L. Fortes, Embraer, Sao Jose dos Campos - São Paulo, Brazil
The continued expansion in air transport has placed an increasing demand on the aerospace industry to manufacture aircraft at lower cost, while ensuring the products are efficient to operate, friendly to the environment and ensure that the safety requirements are met. The primary objective for the aerospace industry is to offer products that not only meet the operating criteria in terms of loads and range but also significantly reduce the direct operating costs of the airlines. Airframe manufacturers therefore continually make effort to improve aerodynamic and structural efficiency, and reduce the cost of the product and maintenance throughout its life cycle. Then, in this context, FSW enters in scene as one of the attractive options to consider mainly for the goal of cost reduction on fuselage of a mid size aircraft.
To show availability of the FSW technology on the EMBRAER products a barrel was chosen contemplating skin and stringer lap joint and skin butt joint as part of the test matrix.
The barrel article tested is a cylinder fuselage section of a mid size aircraft including eight frames. It is basically composed of available fuselage section of a mid size aircraft, with new FSW lateral panels. Each lateral panel includes 10 stringers welded to the skin, one welded butt joint between two skin parts. The barrel ends were closed with dummy steel pressure bulkheads. The design of the barrel panels is mainly concentrated on the fatigue and damage tolerance aspects.
The barrel had lasted for 5 lives of a mid size aircraft pressure cycles, without any crack, showing excellent fatigue behavior. The test showed very good performance in residual strength and crack propagation as well. The analysis and test results revealed that significant cost savings and some weight savings are possible for the metallic structure of a pressurized fuselage using FSW technology.
Summary: Airframe manufacturers continually struggle to improve aerodynamic and structural efficiency, and reduce the cost of the product and maintenance throughout its life cycle. Then, in this context, FSW enters in scene as one of the attractive options to consider mainly for the goal of cost reduction on executive and regional fuselage aircraft.
To show availability of the FSW technology at the EMBRAER products a barrel was chosen contemplating skin/stringer lap joint and skin butt joint as part of the test matrix.
The barrel article tested is a cylinder fuselage section of a mid size aircraft including eight frames. It is basically composed of available fuselage section of a mid size aircraft, with new FSW lateral panels.
