DEVELOPMENT OF THE NEXT GENERATION EUROPEAN LAUNCHER ARIANE 6 : INTRODUCTION OF NEW MATERIALS AND PROCESSES

The development of the next generation European launcher Ariane 6 is in progress under management of Airbus Safran Launchers. MT Aerospace is responsible for the design definition and manufacturing of most of the metallic structures and cryogenic tanks. The challenges of the program are to combine low cost, high performance within a tight time schedule. To achieve the performance targets, new processes and materials are introduced for the first time in Europe. These include the friction stir welding process FSW and aluminum lithium alloy AA2195. Both have been studied intensively at MT during the last years within R&D studies and demonstrators together with Constellium providing material and support.

An overview will be given about

1. Constellium heritage with AA2195 material
2. the Ariane 6 architecture
3. the steps performed to achieve the maturity for application to the Ariane 6 program: studies, demonstrators, material investigations
4. processes and materials applied to Ariane 6 metallic structures and tanks

The FSW process has been selected as joining process combining robustness, highest joining performance and least probability of defects.

Within suitable aluminum materials for cryogenic applications, the AA2195 material shows the highest performance (highest strength with lowest density).

The application of AA2195 however requires intelligent processing to optimize cost of the structure. Cost minimization can be achieved only by optimized near net shape processing as for example shot peen forming, which has been successfully applied for Ariane 5. More than 1000 gore panels have been manufactured with only some single rejects during series production.