596

200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400

Specific Modulus (inch Units) x 10-6
Fig l a: Specific properties of carbon fibres compared
with other fibrous materials
CARBON FIBRES AT BAC
behaviour of carbon, which has a negative expansion
coefficient.
Within British Aircraft Corporation, the development of
carbon fibre composites for structural uses has been going
ahead on several fronts during the past 18 months, much of
it on a private-venture basis. At Weybridge, where the emphasis
is on commercial-aircraft applications, the weight-saving
potentiality of CFRP is the major selling point. At the Preston
Division, concerned with advanced military aircraft, the
attractions of carbon-fibre composites lie in their high stiffness,
for solving difficult distortion problems in highly-swept aero-
dynamic surfaces. Both Weybridge and Preston Divisions,
using pre-pregs supplied by specialist firms, will be taking part
in the MinTech-sponsored collaborative research programme
now getting underway.
At the Stevenage headquarters of BAC's Guided Weapons
Division, the Reinforced and Microwave Plastics Group is
developing, under Ministry of Technology sponsorship, new
types of high temperature composites for applications on
guided weapons. The work is concerned with raw carbon fibre
(Type 1 treated), supplied by Morganite Research and
Development Ltd. The testing facilities of the Guided Weapons
Division' s Filton factory are also deployed on this work, which
is at an early stage.
The Guided Weapons Division is also interested in the
development of manufacturing techniques for missile fins and
wings in composite materials. The main problem here is the
method of attachment of a cross-plied sandwich structure to
the missile body.
WEYBRI DGE:
CFRP in the Three-Eleven
As a private venture since May last year, the Weybridge
Division has been developing CFRP as reinforcement for
conventional light-alloy structure-conservative applications, but
with full fail-safety built in, for immediate weight-saving
benefits in the new BAC Three-Eleven airliner. Plant and
techniques already in use for structural adhesive bonding will
be used. CFRP reinforcing strip, comprising cured unidirec-
tional pre-preg tape, will be bonded to the flanges of
FLI GHT International, 9 April 1970
aluminium alloy beams and stringers. This involves no difficult
problems of load-transference.
In the Three-Eleven, the 20ft-diameter fuselage, 60 per cent
bigger than anything BAC has yet built, poses problems of
transverse-floor-beam deflection. CFRP reinforcement will here
provide adequate stiffness with weight-saving. Other areas for
which CFRP reinforcement is proposed include the wing-root
ribs and pressure-bulkhead stiffeners.
In these applications the permissible strain in the aluminium-
alloy members imposes a limit on the stress level that can be
used in the carbon fibre composite. At this early stage, CFRP
reinforcement will be used only where alternative load paths
are available, to guard against catastrophe should failure occur
in the metal/reinforcement bond or through internal
de-lamination in the composite. Although in this way the
capabilities of CFRP are by no means fully exploited, BAC
has calculated that, for every 1,0001b of CFRP reinforcement
used, 3,0001b of light-alloy structure can be saved. In the
BAC Three-Eleven some 7751b of composite reinforcement is
expected to be used on floor beams, pressure bulkhead
stiffeners and wing root ribs, a saving of over 1,5001b per
airframe.
In the second stage of development, unidirectional CFRP
reinforcement may be applied to integral stringers in the wing,
fin and tail surfaces. This could lead to a maximum usage of
5,0001b of CFRP reinforcement in later developments of the
Three-Eleven. In support of this second stage, a complete test
wing-box with CFRP-reinforced Z-stringer flanges is being
designed for a programmed cyclic-loading test.
To bring all this about, a comprehensive development pro-
gramme is in progress, involving the close co-operation of
designers, laboratory technologists, and production develop-
ment engineers, backed up by the RAE and the various
suppliers concerned in the evaluation programme: carbon-fibre
manufacturers AERE (Harwell) and Courtaulds; resin suppliers
BXL Plastics Materials Group, CIBA (ARL), and the Shell
Chemical Co; and pre-preg processors, Bonded Structures
Division of CIBA, Courtaulds Engineering, Fothergill and
Harvey, and Rotorway Marine.
BAC Weybridge's first task was to extend RAE' s work on
small laboratory test-pieces to much larger specimens represen-
tative of full-scale structure and made in the normal shop-floor
environment. This scaling-up process highlighted some problem
areas: first, that materials suitable for direct use in the existing
production autoclaves were not, in mid-1968, available. The
Weybridge laboratory' s first attempt to produce a beam
specimen reinforced with CFRP was an aluminium-alloy lipped
channel section with the CFRP applied to the inner side of
the flange, using a simple wet lay-up of raw carbon-fibre tows
cured in situa technique recommended by RAE. While this
had worked quite well with small sections, it proved unsuitable
for large-scale production; for one thing, raw carbon fibre is
too sensitive to mishandling for ordinary factory use. More-
over, because aluminium alloy expands when heated while
carbon fibre contracts slightly, the hot curing produced a
specimen which bowed Severely on cooling. Even so, it
behaved well in bending tests.
Weybridge structural engineers therefore decided, instead,
to use built-up aluminium-alloy beams with T-section flanges
and corrugated shear webs, the CFRP reinforcement being
produced as a separate cured strip of cold-bonding to the
outer surface of the T-flange. The raw material for the CFRP
strip is continuous pre-preg tape. This will be made to stringent
BAC specifications now being worked out from statistics
derived from months of tests on various types of fibre and
resin systems, and on realistic specimen components to deter-
mine the ratio of carbon fibre to resin for the optimum
combination of tensile and interlaminar shear strengththe
latter property being vital to structural integrity under bending
and compression.
A batch process is used for making CFRP strip. The pre-
preg tape is cut to the required lengths and a series of
laminated assemblies (similar in build-up to a leaf spring) is
laid upon a table, enclosed by a rubber bag and cured in an
autoclave under closely controlled pressure, temperature and
time. Weybridge has large autoclaves, 30ft long and 10ft in
diameter, giving ample capacity for running-up 20ft lengths
of reinforcement for Three-Eleven floor beams. In every batch