28 February 2024
Co-funded by the European Commission the COMPASS project aims to revolutionise the remanufacturing of end-of-life parts into high quality components. This will lead to significant resource savings and promote a circular economy approach in the aerospace and automotive industries.
04 July 2023
Hydrogen has been identified as a key priority to achieve the European Green Deal for a sustainable economy. By converting the construction of the hydrogen tank from existing metallic solutions to composites, the liquid hydrogen (LH2) composite tank will achieve weight savings that enable the advancement of liquid hydrogen as a sustainable fuel source for civil aviation. This will lower the carbon footprint of air travel and extend the flight range of aircraft by reducing construction weight and cost.
26 June 2023
During the Paris Air Show, the German ECOMAT and Royal Netherlands Aerospace Centre signed a Memorandum of Understanding. With this, the two parties want to combine their scientific and business expertise with regard to lightweight constructions, hydrogen developments, materials research and virtual product development in the aircraft manufacturing industry.
11 April 2023
Royal NLR is aiming to improve two things at the same time: saving weight for aviation structures and speeding up their production processes. NLR is therefore exploring a relatively new technology called large-scale additive manufacturing of fibre-reinforced thermoplastic materials.
05 April 2023
Fatigue of metals can cause premature failure of components and structures that are subject to cyclic loading. To avoid that risk, designers still employ a theory from the 1960s. Royal NLR has now come up with a new equation for calculating the growth rate of cracks under cyclic loading better. The proof of this has recently been published in the journal Engineering Fracture Mechanics.
04 April 2023
The objective was to manufacture three Ti-6Al-4V flaperon ribs by Direct Energy Deposition (DED). With conventional manufacturing processes, it can be very costly or even impossible to produce components with such complex shapes. However, DED is also challenging due to various features inherent in the design: bulky thin parts, asymmetric geometry, overhanging features etc. The main challenge was manufacturing all the structures with the minimum distortion and highest accuracy.
10 February 2023
The Clean Sky 2 Multifunctional Fuselage Demonstrator (MFFD) with its 8.5 meter long composite-made fuselage section with an approx. 4 meter diameter gives a glimpse of what a next-generation aircraft could be. This typical section of a single aisle aircraft fuselage is completely produced from thermoplastic. Now, Royal NLR’s STUNNING project is turning heads as the MFFD’s largest component, the 8.5 meter long lower fuselage skin, has been manufactured and delivered to the project partners.
07 February 2023
Advanced thermoplastic composite technology and smart robotics will significantly reduce weight and manufacturing cost of future aircraft. Now the Clean Sky 2 Thermoplastic Fuselage Demonstrator (MFFD) lower half has been delivered. At 8m by 4m it’s one of the largest known thermoplastic assemblies in the world. It allowed the project to investigate thermal and positioning effects during the manufacturing of these kinds of complex thermoplastic parts.
23 January 2023
Advanced composites are gaining ground in many areas, especially aerospace, automotive and renewable energies, as they are lightweight and help to save energy. What is still missing are accurate and fast pre-production methods to optimise the durability of such large-scale composite structures. The aim of the newly launched EU-funded project D-STANDART is therefore to develop efficient methods to model the durability of large-scale composite structures of any design under realistic conditions.
