Lightweight Composite Sandwich Structure for Navy Aircraft

Today, the majority of sandwich structures on aircraft involve a honeycomb and/or foam core with adhesive bonded face sheets. But, there are problems associated with conventionally cored composites. Honeycomb cored composites are expensive and vulnerable to a variety of environmental threats and shortcomings. These include moisture absorption, internal corrosion, shin-to-core disbonds, shin bulging, low ballistic impact tolerance and low thermal insulation properties. The frequent repair and replacement of honeycomb cored composite offers improved ballistics tolerance and thermal insulation but at the expense of lower shear strength and higher density. The proposed solution is a combination of corrugated truss core sandwich construction and 3-D tufted preform technology. The 3-D preform technology will result in fiber dominated properties throughout the structure, thus allowing the high specific strength of the core to be realizes in the overall structure. To succeed in developing a high performance sandwich structure with acceptable commercialization potential, Techniweave has teamed with LMTAS as a subcontractor to identify fighter aircraft and commercial/military transport applications and to conduct testing and analytical analysis of the proposed composite structures.