Adopting automotive out of clave manufacturing speed and cost saving for Attritable aircraft components

Fiber reinforced composites are the material of choice for aerospace applications due to their high strength and stiffness-to-weight ratio, and fatigue tolerance. However, traditional continuous fiber composites suffer from several drawbacks including slow processing time, and high touch labor. As a result, the automotive industry has focused on increasing fabrication speed by eliminating touch labor and avoiding prepreg material that requires lengthy cycle times in an autoclave. To achieve this, out of clave methods such as Resin Transfer Molding (RTM) were adopted to introduce the resin to the fabric on site. In the proposed work, defect free nonwoven reinforcement fabrics with fiber length greater than 25mm will be produced using a novel wet laid dispersing system. The nonwoven fabric will be processed into composite using the RTM method with special formulated thermosetting resins that still carry aerospace performance. The resulting materials have been shown to exhibit quasi-isotropic mechanical properties that exceed common automotive materials at similar manufacturing time and in some cases at lower costs. Touch labor is reduced by eliminating the need for complex quasi-isotropic laminate sequences that must be carefully followed in the case of continuous fiber reinforcement.