Glare - History of the Development of a New Aircraft Material PDF
Preview Glare - History of the Development of a New Aircraft Material
Glare This page intentionally left blank Glare history of the development of a new aircraft material by Ad Vlot Delft University of Technology, Facultyof Aerospace Engineering, Delft, The Netherlands KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS NEW YORK,BOSTON, DORDRECHT, LONDON, MOSCOW eBookISBN: 0-306-48398-X Print ISBN: 1-4020-0124-X ©2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers NewYork, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow Print ©2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers Dordrecht All rights reserved No part of this eBook maybe reproducedor transmitted inanyform or byanymeans,electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without written consent from the Publisher Created in the United States of America Visit Kluwer Online at: http://kluweronline.com and Kluwer's eBookstore at: http://ebooks.kluweronline.com Preface 1 Prologue 7 1 The birth of Arall (1945-1981) 17 2 Arall takes to the air (1981-1988) 51 3 Toward Glare, fuselages and the U.S. (1988-1997) 85 4 Glare in Europe - a long, long runway (1988-1997) 111 5 The end of the beginning - from A3XX to A380 (1996-2001) 141 Epilogue 191 Appendix 205 This page intentionally left blank Delft has long been famous for its pottery. However, Delft has recently also become widely known for producing another important material named ‘Glare’. This is an aircraft material built up from thin layers of aluminium bonded together with adhesive containing embedded fibres. The resulting laminated material is designed to have a very high resistance against fatigue. The development and application of a new material for use in the primary structures of commercial aircraft is virtually a once-in-a-lifetime event. At the beginning of the century, this is only the third time that a new class of materials has been applied in the primary structure of a passenger aircraft, with the two previous occasions being the change from wood to aluminium in the 1930s and the gradual introduction of composites (fibre-reinforced plastics) in the 1970s and 1980s. This book tells the story of the twenty years that it took to develop and promote this new material in a laboratory of a technical university. This is the right time to document the history of the development of Glare, as in a couple of years the memories of the key personnel involved will fade and the story could never be 1 Preface reconstructed in the same way using only the paper records preserved in the archives of Delft, AKZO, ALCOA and the other companies that played a role. In this book I hope to provide the inside story of this project, giving a taste of the unique style that characterised the work in and around our university lab. This book is not meant as a success story to show the world how excellent our research group was, but as an inside story to give the reader an accurate picture of the process and the people, the frustrations and the successes, and the stamina, belief and dedication that is required to enable such a new technology to take off. This book has a number of themes: the importance of the culture of an organisation, the tension between fundamental and ‘applied’ research, the co-operation between the university and industry, a new technology as a plaything in and between companies, the importance of belief. I believe that telling such a story is useful, since public attention is usually drawn only to the results of new technology, for example a shiny aircraft or a dark disaster. What happens behind the scenes is not the unworldly work of researchers with thick glasses who wear white coats and stare all day through microscopes, expressing their views in mathematical formulae. It is the work of normal people. It is not dull work compared, for example, to the work of surgeons and lawyers played in many television soaps, but fascinating work aimed at understanding and changing our world; work carried out by a team of enthusiastic people that share not only their work but also their lives. The main scene of the story is the Structures and Materials Laboratory of the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. In this laboratory, there are always several projects in progress at the same time. This book focuses on the development of two fibre-metal laminates, Arall (with aramid fibres) and Glare (with glass fibres). The enthusiastic driving force behind this work was Professor Boud Vogelesang, and this book is therefore dedicated to him on the occasion of his formal retirement, which was marked by an international conference on fibre-metal laminates in Delft from the to the of September 2001. The work of another group of people in this laboratory, led by Professors De Jong and Beukers, is not treated here, but it has to be said that their work was also essential for the development of fibre-metal laminates. As is usual at the Delft Structures and Materials Laboratory, both teams worked together within the faculty research group, although the relationship was at times fuelled by competition and fierce discussions. However, the complete story of the Structures and Materials Laboratory in 2 Preface Delft would take a separate volume. More about the work of Beukers can be found in the book Lightness.1 This book can never be complete. The development of the new material took place as a result of the interactions of many organisations and people. Over the lifetime of the project, more than one hundred undergraduate and graduate students wrote their Master’s theses on related problems, each making a small contribution to the jigsaw puzzle. Decisions were taken and battles were fought behind the doors of conference rooms and boardrooms of different companies in Europe and in the U.S. To mention everyone’s individual contribution would take us far beyond the scope of this book, which focuses on the core developments. To readers who find that their contribution is not mentioned here, I can only say I am sorry. Exclusions were inevitable; they certainly do not imply that the omitted work was irrelevant. Even within the present text choices had to be made. It may be that this has led to occasional oversights and mistakes. I count on your consideration. To prevent mistakes, the only alternative is to not write a book like this and I think that would be a bigger mistake. 1 Adriaan Beukers and Ed van Hinte, Lightness – the inevitable renaissance of minimum energy structures. Rotterdam: 010 publishers, 1998. 3
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