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Center of Attention
Boeing built its first aircraft, the B&W float plane, from spruce and canvas in 1916, but it wasn’t long before aluminum became the dominant material in the aerospace industry. Now, after decades of design, manufacturing and maintenance experience with aluminum, another shift is taking place—this time to polymer composites.
Metal to plastic planes? That’s a bigger jump than eight-track-to-cassette tapes.
With a shift of such magnitude comes a host of challenges and opportunities. As home to the Center on Advanced Materials in Transport Aircraft Structures, the UW is lending the aerospace industry the support it needs to exploit the advantages of composites and other advanced materials—now and in the future.
Led by the UW and established by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 2003, the center is a consortium of academic institutions (the others are Washington State University, Oregon State University and Edmonds Community College), government agencies and aerospace companies—notably Boeing. Wichita State University is leading a second such FAA consortium.
The two Centers of Excellence are charged with helping the United States remain a worldwide leader in aviation research and development. More specifically, their work is helping the FAA develop safety and certification standards for the increased use of composites and other advanced materials in commercial aircraft.
 © 2007 The Boeing Company
The center is also helping develop courses covering the repair of plastic aircraft. “How to repair an aluminum structure … is well-known by every airline maintenance depot in the world,” says Mark Tuttle, chair of the UW’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and director of the federal center. “How to repair a composite structure is well-known by Boeing, but not by every maintenance depot around the world.”
Because they don’t fatigue or corrode like aluminum, composites present different inspection requirements. Yet they can still suffer damage. Lin developed a new design process to make composites more damage-resistant and help determine appropriate inspection intervals.
A big plus for composites is their diminished demand for fasteners, which prunes both parts and pounds. Even so, a certain number of bolts are still needed in addition to adhesives to connect composite pieces to one another. The center currently is looking for ways to use even fewer fasteners through improved adhesive bonding.
“If we could understand adhesive bonding perfectly, we could reduce the weight of these structures further still,” says Tuttle.—Brad Broberg
See http://depts.washington.edu/amtas/
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