The completion of the SSAM facility makes the Al Ain manufacturer now the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)’s first supplier of aerospace-grade pre-impregnated carbon fibres and the fourth globally. The completion of the facility also marks a new chapter in Abu Dhabi’s drive towards a sustainable homegrown manufacturing sector.

The 8,500 square meter SSAM facility is currently being equipped with the latest technology and machinery prior to the testing and qualifying of processes designed to supply carbon fibre prepreg materials for primary structure applications in Boeing’s 777X programme.

The constant enhancement and expansion of Abu Dhabi’s aerospace manufacturing capabilities reflect our commitment towards product and service excellence for our partners, customers and the global market. We look forward to strengthening our global partnerships as we aim to further grow Abu Dhabi’s participation within the global aerospace supply chain.

Badr Al-Olama, Chairman of Strata and Head of Aerospace at Mubadala

The company say that key positions have already been filled and that Khalid Al Nuaimi, a Strata engineer, will head the Strata Solvay project and manage communications between the two companies, as well as execute the business plan, budget and purchasing of equipment for the facility.

Strata work with leading aircraft manufacturers, including Airbus, Boeing, Leonardo, and Pilatus. Based at Nibras Al Ain Aerospace Park, Strata supports the development of a leading aerospace hub in Abu Dhabi as part of the emirate’s economic diversification initiatives.

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More than twenty 3D printers are working day and night. Hundreds of visors have already been produced and dispatched to hospitals close to the Airbus facilities in Spain. Airbus leverages a patented design to manufacture the visor frames, using PLA plastics. 

Overnight, we have gone from making aerospace concepts to medical equipment. This genuinely makes a difference in the fight against the pandemic and I couldn’t be prouder of our teams working day and night on this Airbus project.

Alvaro Jara, Head of Airbus Protospace, in Getafe, Madrid

Despite the pause of the majority of production at Airbus’ sites in Spain following the Royal Decree of 29 March, Airbus employees are allowed on site to continue with this essential activity. 

In addition, Airbus in Germany also joined the project. The Airbus Protospace Germany and the Airbus Composite Technology Centre (CTC) in Stade, together with the 3D-printing network named “Mobility goes Additive,” are now supporting this project in Spain, also coordinating the collection and transport of visors to the Madrid region. 

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Airbus partially resumed production and assembly work in France and Spain on Monday, 23 March following a four-day pause. At the same time, operations in the UK, Germany and the US continued at normal rates. Based on the adapted ways of working which reflect the new health and safety measures, Airbus is continuing to evaluate its production flow. 

The company’s wing plants in Bremen, Filton and Broughton will be reduced, with an extended Easter holiday implemented at Broughton and Filton and a reduced working week at Bremen. The sites will remain open during this period and will continue to ensure wing deliveries to the final assembly lines, the receipt and control of materials and components from the supply chain, building and installation maintenance, critical administrative support and preparation for activity restart. Employees will continue to perform activities remotely via home-working where their activities are not directly related to the production activity being adapted.

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The company will use the time to further deep clean and sanitise workspaces and facilities as they continue to take precautions to protect the health and safety of its workforce against the COVID-19 pandemic.

When production does resume on the Boeing programs, the company will align the costs and workforce to the new level of production set by Boeing. This could potentially include additional workforce actions.

Operations in support of Spirit AeroSystems defence customers, Airbus, aftermarket and MRO, third party fabrication work, other non-Boeing work, and other growth programs will continue.

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The new facility, which will create more than 100 new jobs in Scotland has been equipped with state-of-the-art composite manufacturing machinery using the latest automation and robotics. With this new facility, Spirit will achieve the required rate of approximately 700 aircraft and 7,000 spoilers annually.

The opening of this new facility is part of Spirit’s journey to becoming a leader in advanced out of autoclave composite technology. It demonstrates how we can develop cost-effective new technologies and manufacturing processes that will play a central role in the next generation of aircraft programs.

Scott McLarty, Spirit AeroSystem’s senior vice president of Airbus programs

Spirit AeroSystems is one of the largest manufacturers of aerostructures in the world with design and builds capabilities for both commercial and defence customers. In addition to spoilers, the company currently produces Airbus’s A320 family leading and trailing edge.

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Saertex supplies Bombardier in Belfast with textile reinforcement materials and carbon fibre non-crimp-fabrics to produce wing skins for the A220 aircraft using its resin transfer infusion (RTI) manufacturing process. Bombardier’s carbon-fibre wings are currently the largest and most complex composite structures designed, manufactured and assembled, using this infusion technology.

Saertex’s carbon-fibre, non-crimp-fabrics was developed especially for Bombardier’s Resin Transfer Infusion manufacturing technology. The resulting significant weight savings help the A220 deliver unbeatable fuel efficiency in a single-aisle aircraft.

The wings of the A220 are built by Bombardier at the company’s Belfast plant in Northern Ireland. Spirit AeroSystems has entered into an agreement with Bombardier to acquire its aerostructures and aftermarket activities in Belfast, Casablanca and Dallas. The transaction is expected to complete in the first half of 2020 and remains subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.

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Now MIT engineers have developed a method to produce aerospace-grade composites without the enormous ovens and pressure vessels. The technique may help to speed up the manufacturing of aeroplanes and other large, high-performance composite structures, such as blades for wind turbines.

The researchers detail their new method in a paper published in the journal Advanced Materials Interfaces.

If you’re making a primary structure like a fuselage or wing, you need to build a pressure vessel, or autoclave, the size of a two- or three-story building, which itself requires time and money to pressurize. These things are massive pieces of infrastructure. Now we can make primary structure materials without autoclave pressure, so we can get rid of all that infrastructure. Brian Wardle, professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT

Wardle’s co-authors on the paper are lead author and MIT postdoc Jeonyoon Lee, and Seth Kessler of Metis Design Corporation, an aerospace structural health monitoring company based in Boston.

Out of the oven, into a blanket

In 2015, Lee led the team, along with another member of Wardle’s lab, in creating a method to make aerospace-grade composites without requiring an oven to fuse the materials together. Instead of placing layers of material inside an oven to cure, the researchers essentially wrapped them in an ultrathin film of carbon nanotubes (CNTs). When they applied an electric current to the film, the CNTs, like a nanoscale electric blanket, quickly generated heat, causing the materials within to cure and fuse together.

With this out-of-oven, or OoO, technique, the team was able to produce composites as strong as the materials made in conventional aeroplane manufacturing ovens, using only 1 per cent of the energy.

The researchers next looked for ways to make high-performance composites without the use of large, high-pressure autoclaves — building-sized vessels that generate high enough pressures to press materials together, squeezing out any voids, or air pockets, at their interface.

Researchers including Wardle’s group have explored “out-of-autoclave,” or OoA, techniques to manufacture composites without using the huge machines. But most of these techniques have produced composites where nearly 1 per cent of the material contains voids, which can compromise a material’s strength and lifetime. In comparison, aerospace-grade composites made in autoclaves are of such high quality that any voids they contain are negligible and not easily measured.

Straw pressure

Part of Wardle’s work focuses on developing nanoporous networks — ultrathin films made from aligned, microscopic material such as carbon nanotubes, that can be engineered with exceptional properties, including colour, strength, and electrical capacity. The researchers wondered whether these nanoporous films could be used in place of giant autoclaves to squeeze out voids between two material layers, as unlikely as that may seem.

A thin film of carbon nanotubes is somewhat like a dense forest of trees, and the spaces between the trees can function like thin nanoscale tubes or capillaries. A capillary such as a straw can generate pressure based on its geometry and its surface energy, or the material’s ability to attract liquids or other materials.

The researchers tested their idea in the lab by growing films of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes using a technique they previously developed, then laying the films between layers of materials that are typically used in the autoclave-based manufacturing of primary aircraft structures. They wrapped the layers in a second film of carbon nanotubes, which they applied an electric current to heat it up. They observed that as the materials heated and softened in response, they were pulled into the capillaries of the intermediate CNT film.

The resulting composite lacked voids, similar to aerospace-grade composites that are produced in an autoclave. The researchers subjected the composites to strength tests, attempting to push the layers apart, the idea being that voids, if present, would allow the layers to separate more easily.

The team will next look for ways to scale up the pressure-generating CNT film. In their experiments, they worked with samples measuring several centimetres wide — large enough to demonstrate that nanoporous networks can pressurize materials and prevent voids from forming. To make this process viable for manufacturing entire wings and fuselages, researchers will have to find ways to manufacture CNT and other nanoporous films at a much larger scale.

He plans also to explore different formulations of nanoporous films, engineering capillaries of varying surface energies and geometries, to be able to pressurize and bond other high-performance materials.

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In a paper published by the journal Nature Materials, scientists and engineers from Surrey and Airbus Defence and Space detail how they have developed a multi-layered nano-barrier that bonds with the CFRP and eliminates the need for multiple bake-out stages and the controlled storage required in its unprotected state.

We are confident that the reinforced composite we have reported is a significant improvement over similar methods and materials already on the market. These encouraging results suggest that our barrier could eliminate the considerable costs and dangers associated with using carbon fibre reinforced polymers in space missions. Professor Ravi Silva, Director of the Advanced Technology Institute at the University of Surrey

Surrey engineers have shown that their thin nano-barrier – measuring only sub-micrometres in thickness, compared to the tens of micrometres of current space mission coatings – is less susceptible to stress and contamination at the surface, keeping its integrity even after multiple thermal cycles.

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The multidisciplinary team involved researchers from academic institutions, business enterprises such as Nanesa and Avanzare, and large transportation end-user industries, such as Airbus and Fiat. They showed that integrating graphene and related materials (GRMs) into fibre-reinforced composites (FRCs) has great potential to improve weight and strength, and helps to overcome the bottlenecks limiting the applications of these composites in planes, cars, wind turbines and more. Nowadays, the transportation industry is responsible for nearly one-third of global energy demand, and it is the major source of pollution and greenhouse gas emissions in urban areas. Scientists are therefore continually trying to develop new materials to lower fuel usage and CO₂ emissions, helping to mitigate environmental damage and climate change

Graphene-integrated composites are an example of lighter materials with great potential for use in vehicle frameworks. They are constructed by introducing graphene sheets, a few billionths of a metre thick, into hierarchical fibre composites as a nano-additives. Hierarchical fibre composites are a type of composite material in which components of different sizes are combined in a controlled way to significantly improve the mechanical properties. They typically consist of micro- or mesoscopic carbon fibres, a few millionths of a metre thick, attached to a polymer matrix, and they are already used as building materials to make vehicles of all shapes and sizes.

Graphene’s high aspect ratio, high flexibility and mechanical strength enable it to enhance the strength of weak points in these composites, such as at the interface between two different components. Its tunable surface chemistry also means that interactions with the carbon fibre and polymer matrix can be adjusted as needed. The fibre, polymer matrix and graphene layers all work together to distribute mechanical stress, resulting in a material with improved strength and other beneficial properties.

There are many challenges to consider. For instance, planes experience temperature changes between 20 °C and -40 °C every time they take off and land, with huge differences in pressure and humidity. Graphene-integrated composites, therefore, need to withstand water condensing and even freezing inside the fuselage. They also need to endure lightning strikes, which happen several times per month, so the conductive properties of graphene must be harnessed to create an electrically conductive framework that resists electromagnetic impulses. In cars, new structural materials must be able to withstand crash tests and be lightweight enough to ensure fuel efficiency. Graphene Flagship researchers are also investigating conductive materials to replace circuitry in-car dashboards.

The group’s partners at Queen Mary University and the National Graphene Institute, UK, FORTH-Hellas, Greece, CNR, Italy, and Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, collaborated with researchers at the University of Turin, the University of Trento and KET-LAB, Italy, and the University of Patras, Greece, to provide perspectives from the research community. They worked with scientists at Graphene Flagship partner companies Nanesa, Italy, and Avanzare, Spain, to review the technological viability of graphene-incorporated FRCs.

Airbus and Fiat-Chrysler Automobiles have evaluated the impact of graphene-incorporated FRCs on the aerospace and automotive industries and assessed their commercial viability.

We all know that the aeronautical sector is very challenging for the introduction of new materials or technologies. Airbus is committed to making graphene-related materials fly as soon as possible, and a step-by-step approach is being set up. Tamara Blanco-Varela, co-author and materials & processes engineer at Airbus

By selecting ‘quick-win’ applications with immediate benefits to the aerospace industry, Airbus anticipates that graphene-integrated FRCs will reach the market soon. One example is using these materials for anti- and de-icing purposes in aeroplanes, for which Airbus will be leading activities targeting commercial exploitation of this technology. The company is hoping for it to reach a high maturity level, with a target readiness level between five and six, in the next few years.

Brunetto Martorana, researcher at Fiat-Chrysler Automobiles, adds: “The interesting structural properties of graphene have opened an interesting window for designing novel light composites.” He explains that new lightweight composite materials do not necessarily need to be lower in strength and introduce safety issues. “New approaches must be found to enhance the ‘crashworthiness’ of composites – and graphene composites may be able to fill that role,” he continues. Fiat-Chrysler Automobiles have now committed to the commercialization of new composite materials, and will be leading a new initiative to bring this technology to market.”

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We are very pleased to collaborate with Airbus to apply our 3D design and manufacturing know-how to their next-generation aircraft. We believe Albany provides unique design and production capabilities to Airbus, and this agreement marks an exciting and important next step in our relationship. Olivier Jarrault, Albany International President and CEO

Albany’s 3D composite technology, used extensively today in the CFM Leap Engine, will be adapted to the unique requirements of Airbus’s next-generation airframe and production system. Albany believes its innovative resin-infused dry 3D fibre preform technology will deliver a cost-effective, out-of-autoclave wing substructure solution to Airbus that achieves superior damage tolerance and resistance to out-of-plane loads, and is more scalable to their desired production rates for next-generation single-aisle aircraft.

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