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
Project: STUNNING (Smart and affordable THeRmoplastic fUselage demonstratioN for huGE aircraft)
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.
20 January 2023
In recent years, improving energy efficiency (i.e. fuel consumption) and emission reduction have led to increased engine sizes and bypass ratios. These modifications create a crucial noise issue due to the emission of low-frequency noise and the size and effectiveness limitations of the current noise-absorbing structures (liners).
15 November 2022
Morphing structures that let components change from one shape to another and additive manufacturing for producing lightweight and complex structures are regularly highlighted as innovative technologies for the aviation sector; both of them will help achieve aviation’s goal of being climate-neutral by 2050. In the Clean Sky 2 project MANTA, these various innovations are being brought together to make the aircraft of tomorrow a reality.
