New Aviation Composite Panel Manufacturing Process Research

Composite material is the material with two or more different characters, composed in physical and chemical methods. By material design, each constituent performance will complement and associate with each other to get new predominant performance. Advanced composite material is the critical part of new military material development. It is not only good structure material, but also ideal functional material, which is used to reduce weapon weight and increase tactic and technical indicators. In the battle aircraft, the composite material is used in the major stressed structures, such as wing skin, fuselage, vertical fin, flap, horizontal tail cone, side panel, bulkhead, rib and stiffener.This paper mainly researches on the new composite panel manufacturing process used in the aircraft fuselage. Learning from the previous practices, the research members summarize the advantages and disadvantages of carbon felt wet-forming parameters, curing forming plan, soft and hard form stringer forming model and fully-hard form stringer forming model, so as to ensure the research of new composite panel.The new composite panel consists with skin and stringer, in the form of sheet and spar structure. Compared with former panels, the oil tank dimension is increased; new material is used on the layer of access panel sunken area-carbon felt; the max thickness of panel bottom is increased, as well as step grade. So this paper must start from the practical production and perform further research on the tooling material, structure and detailed manufacturing process.In addition, this paper is pursuing the solution on the defects of profile out-of-tolerance, stringer axes excursion etc. that occur in the process of composite material panel stringer manufacturing. Thus new tooling material and tooling structure, as well as advanced digital manufacturing technique, are required to explore new forming process in order to ensure the success of project researching.