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The driving force to get new lightweight composite materials into the air comes from the increasing cost of fuel worldwide. An airline industry's response to higher fuel charges is to make aircraft lighter and more fuel efficient. What appears to be a paradox is that as the cost of fuel is going up, so is the size of airframe; the new Airbus super-jumbo A380 is an example. New composite materials including those based on carbon fibre (CFRP) and the glass fibre laminate called GLARE are replacing aluminium alloys, and modern civil airliners like Boeing's brand new 787, and the Airbus A350 may contain up to 50% by weight of composite material. The infrastructure required to support these new advances includes: fibre production and resin processing, manufacture of innovative fibre pre-preg architecture, new machine tools and assembly jigs, advanced fabrication processes and factory-of-the-future design, structure formulation of composite material systems, and revised test methods. In addition, is the need for improved design techniques to optimise airframe layout thereby maximising acceptable (safe) working loads. And at the same time, we must reduce fabrication costs through automation and low temperature curing matrix systems, and certify practical advanced inspection techniques for defect detection and repair. In the UK alone, we have 3,000 companies with 150,000 employed directly in aerospace, and 350,000 indirectly employed. The turnover in 2001 was 18.42 billion (58% civil, 42% military) and was the UK's second highest export sector with 2.8 billion. The total projected aircraft market (1999 - 2008) is more than $500 billion.The expectation is for materials to last longer and for structures to operate safely and reliably at increasingly higher stresses. In the case of engine components, we expect the material to work successfully at even greater elevated temperature. The requirement is to push the performance of the structure to its limit thereby stretching composite materials to their boundary of strength and endurance. Innovation in design and advancement in material know-how through discovery is no longer the single option. Now safety becomes the first issue of the day. At the moment, we see airframes made from composites, arriving at the probability of a successful outcome of a safe design by using intuition and our experience of circumstances that we have encountered before. But if we are to imagine the future differently, disaster as an act of God or of bad luck has to go. Predictive engineering design by intelligent-informed empiricism is the only show in town , the purpose of which is the identification and avoidance of all conceivable sources of weakness in the material and misfortune of structure. As always in science, advancement made brings a new set of great unknowns into sharper focus. Having discovered that we can grasp the basics of the origins of composite material behaviour, a myriad of other questions present themselves, questions about structural integrity and reliability of airframes, for instance, that we can realistically hope to answer. Currently, however, the development of civil aerospace composite materials lacks proven test methodologies, reliable durability assessment techniques, and certification procedures to satisfy the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) in the USA. In particular, the UK aerospace industry requires the formulation of new composite certification standards in tandem with evolving composite technology. Towards these ends, the FAA has formed a US Partnership in Advanced Materials in Transport Aircraft Structures (AMTAS) led by the University of Washington, which has on-board industry, government and academia. In this respect, we lag behind in the UK. This Workshop will point out the path to follow for UK dominance in the application of aerospace composite material systems.
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