TUKWILA – The Boeing Co. rolled out the barrel on Tuesday, showing off an aft fuselage section for the 7E7 that was cast as one piece of carbon fiber.
It’s a milestone in the development of the 7E7 – and in the history of flight – Boeing officials said.
“If you want to be part of the future of aviation, you’d better be able to work with composites,” said Frank Statkus, the 7E7 program’s vice president in charge of technology, tools and processes.
Boeing’s new airplane will be built with carbon-fiber composites, a fiberglasslike mixture of fabric and resin that pound-for-pound is stronger than the metals used in aircraft today.
It also will be built in a new way, which Tuesday’s demonstration highlighted.
When building metal planes, Boeing starts with a steel framework, to which curved aluminum panels are riveted in place. The process is labor-intensive and requires thousands of parts, most of them tiny fasteners.
With the new plane, Boeing and its partners will cast complete airplane sections – or barrels – in one piece.
A machine will wrap carbon-fiber tape around a form. Reinforcing composite stringers are attached on the inside, and a caul sheet – a glossy outer shell of composite material – is laid over the top.
The piece is vacuum-sealed to remove the air and ensure there are no bubbles between the layers, and then the whole piece is baked in an autoclave, which is like a high-tech oven and pressure cooker.
That will vastly simplify assembly of the plane, said Walt Gillette, Boeing vice president in charge of 7E7 engineering and manufacturing.
“This is one part number,” he said. “This is a single piece.”
Boeing and its 7E7 fuselage partners – Alenia of Italy, Kawasaki Heavy Industries of Japan and Vought Aircraft Industries of Dallas – have decades of experience working with carbon-fiber composites on airplanes, trains and rockets, Gillette said.
But the new airplane’s sections are larger than anything anyone has cast before, he said. Boeing and its partners also have had to figure out a process that will work efficiently so the sections can be mass-produced.
They started exploring concepts in November 2003, and shortly after Thanksgiving tested the process for the first time. It was a “tremendous success right out of the box,” Gillette said, and resulted in the section Boeing showed off to reporters Tuesday.
The development team started with the most difficult part of the fuselage, the aft fuselage, which has multiple curves and tapers toward the end.
“Having made this part, we know we can make any point of the 7E7 fuselage,” Gillette said.
Boeing and its partners will continue to refine the process this year before the partners begin manufacturing the sections for the first 7E7, which is scheduled to take flight in 2007.
Composites are a huge leap forward for the aerospace industry, Gillette said. They’re 15 percent to 20 percent lighter than aluminum don’t wear out as fast. The problem has always been finding a cost-effective way to manufacture them, he said.
Given that, developing an efficient way to cast complete fuselage sections is “one of probably the top two or three milestones for the Dreamliner … maybe even the second century of flight,” Gillette said. “It’s so important to Boeing, it’s so important to the industry, to be able to build using this material.”
Reporter Bryan Corliss: 425-339-3454 or corliss@heraldnet.com.
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