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Page 1 of 5 Once it was just used for fishing rods and snowboards. Now they are making passenger airplanes out of composites. UW experts talk about the 787 and what’s next in the materials revolution.  Artist's rendering of the 787 Dreamliner in flight. © 2007 The Boeing Company.
The blue and white of Azerbaijan Airlines. The turquoise and silver of Korean Air. The red, yellow and green of Ethiopian Airlines.
But that’s just paint. Scratch it and the material beneath will reveal some purple and gold fingerprints.
The 787—a.k.a. the Dreamliner—is the first commercial airplane in the world built largely from polymer composites. It’s a milestone in the use of plastic, an all-in wager for Boeing and a source of pride for composites experts at the University of Washington.
“We’ve been working on these materials and related things for most of our professional careers and it’s really, really neat to see it finally really making inroads in the aviation industry,” says Mark Tuttle, chair of the UW Department of Mechanical Engineering.
Making inroads? More like revolutionizing the industry. The 787’s reliance on polymer composites—the stuff of snowboards and fishing rods—signals a giant left turn in the way commercial airplanes will be built from now on.
“It’s the future,” says Kuen Lin, a UW aeronautics professor.
The University of Washington—especially the College of Engineering—has had a close relationship with Boeing “forever,” says Tuttle. “The first wind tunnel on the West Coast was built on the UW campus by Bill Boeing in 1918.”
Now, the Dreamliner represents another first in which the UW shares a slice of history with Boeing. The company’s vision of fashioning its eighth 7-something-7 largely from plastic would never have left the runway without advances in polymer composite technology—including contributions from researchers at the University of Washington.
“It’s sort of an overstatement to say we’ve been ‘the leaders,’ since all major universities within the U.S. have active composite research programs, but we’ve been active participants in the development of polymer composites and we’re among a community of people who’ve worked on this for 25 or 30 years,” says Tuttle.
Example: a design algorithm for composite structures that Tuttle developed with Zelda Zabinski, an industrial engineering professor. The algorithm, 10 years in the making, is embedded within a software package called COSTADE that was used in the preliminary design of the 787 fuselage.
 © 2007 The Boeing Company
His UW education prepared him for this role more than he imagined at the time. While his home department at the UW was materials science and engineering, he did his Ph.D. thesis on bone crystals under a professor in the School of Medicine. “It was great training for building an airplane. I had to work with people with different technical languages and backgrounds and find ways to share that information,” he explains.
Composites, however, were not regarded as the wave of the future in the early 1970s, he adds. “The only composites class I had was on the mechanics of fiberglass. The vision wasn’t there.”
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