Recent advances in building with composites

Abstract

Composite materials have gained popularity (despite their generally high cost) in high performance products that need to be lightweight, yet strong enough to take high loads such as aerospace structures (tails, wings and fuselages), boat construction, bicycle frames and racing car bodies. Other uses include storage tanks and fishing rods. Natural composites (wood and fabrics) have found applications in aircraft from the first flight of the Wright Brothers' Flyer 1, in North Carolina on 17 December 1903, to the plethora of uses now enjoyed by engineered materials on both military and civil aircraft, in addition to more exotic applications on unmanned aerial vehicles, space launchers and satellites. Their growing use has arisen from their high specific strength and stiffness, when compared to the more conventional materials, and the ability to tailor their structure to produce more aerodynamically efficient structural configurations. In this paper, it is argued that fibre reinforced polymers, especially carbon fibre reinforced plastics can and will in the near future contribute more than 50% of the structural mass of an aircraft. However, affordability is the key to survival in aerospace, whether civil or military, and therefore efforts should be devoted to analysis and computational simulation of the manufacturing and assembly process as well as the simulation of the performance of the structure, since they are intimately connected.