Advanced Technology for Improving Composite Material Ply Utilization in Aircraft Maintenance

Repairing composite aircraft parts is a significant and crucial task at OC-ALC and other DOD facilities. Composite repairs may be monolithic layups, foam, metal, or honeycomb core, or hybrid composite parts with metal structure or inserts. The proposed project introduces new design and analysis techniques, specifically stochastic design improvement, to improve the quality and reduce the weight and cost of composite aircraft part repairs; making them lighter while preserving structural design margins and other design goals, or by making the parts stronger while using the same amount of composite material. Stochastic design improvement is a shift toward a new 21st century design engineering paradigm, using sufficiently complex engineering models, abundant computer resources, and sophisticated automatic engineering design and development tools to remove unintentional bias and produce improved parts with better strength to weight ratios and reduced risk, maximizing return on investment for the entire manufacturing process. This process is also applicable to metal parts, but is focused here on composite parts in compliance with the SBIR work statement. The example discussed to illustrate use of this new technology at OC-ALC is a notional radome repair using composite honeycomb core. This advanced technology will seamlessly integrate into the OC-ALC environment, since it is based on the same software and manufacturing technology currently used by OC-ALC and its contractors.