Single minded

UK Aerospace engineers claim to  have produced one of the world’s most advanced aircraft structures. The group at BAE Systems’ Samlesbury production facility recently unveiled a 4:5 scale model of a Dassault Falcon business jet fuselage that has been made from a single piece of carbon fibre.

While a conventional fuselage consists of a large number of different components and fasteners, the BAE model is made from just one piece, with a few foam and carbon inserts placed in appropriate areas for additional strength.

Aerospace engineers are interested in the use of composite structural materials for a variety of reasons. Simon Baxter, a BAE engineer who worked on the project, explained: ‘Not only does a composite structure reduce assembly costs, it also makes the aircraft lighter which increases range and/or payload. In addition, there is less of a problem with fatigue as there are no metallic parts.’

Rather than using the traditional method of laying down carbon fibre plies by hand, the fuselage — jointly designed by Dassault Aviation and BAE — was manufactured by BAE using the relatively new technique of automated fibre placement. Here, a robot was used to lay individual strips of carbon fibre on to a mould. The technique is thought to result in a far higher-quality material than that produced using the traditional hand-laid fibre plies method.