Research On Titanium Alloy Honeycomb Panel Manufacturing Technology

Honeycomb panel structures have been widely used in aircraft and aerospace applications due to their remarkable strength-to-weight ratio, high temperature capability, and excellent corrosion resistance. A three-layer structure of a honeycomb panel consists of the upper and lower face sheets and a honeycomb core situated between them. In honeycomb structures, the face sheets are the prime load-bearing element, and honeycomb core provides the enough bending resistance when subjected to shear loading. Apart from being an important composition of metallic thermal protection system, these capabilities also make the honeycomb panel structures more and more attractive to be the prime load-carrying component. There are two common types of light-weight metallic honeycomb panel structures that have been successfully used in aerospace field. The first type is aluminum honeycomb panel bonded by adhesive technology, and the other type is titanium honeycomb panel using brazing technology to join together. The applications of honeycomb panel for use at elevated temperature and higher load-carrying capability make the titanium honeycomb panel structures more and more outstanding and applicable than the other types.The present investigation focuses on the manufacture technology of titanium honeycomb panel structures which is made by TC1 core, TC4 plate and Ti-37.5Zr-15Cu-10 Ni amorphous foils. Firstly, a gear unit with a distortion mold was designed based on plastic bending sheet metal theory and with this device the author got qualified corrugated board, then connected the corrugated boards using spot welding craft and studied the effect of spot welding process parameters. Secondly, prepared honeycomb panel by connecting the plates and honeycomb core in vacuum brazing furnace and analyzed the influences on welding quality by brazing process parameters. Finally, the press and three-point bending tests was conducted to get the compression and shear strength of the honeycomb plane.Study shows that the reasonable point welding parameters are as follows : electrode pressure 150 N, welding current 530 A, welding time 0.005 S. The shear strength of welding point in this welding parameter is 164 MPa through the tensile tests. For the honeycomb plane which is made by TC4 plate and TC1 core, the height of core is 15 mm, the thickness of wall is 0.05 mm, and the thickness of plate is 0.8mm. The optimal welding temperature is 935℃ and preservation time is 10 min. The compression strength of honeycomb plane made in this parameters is 1.93 MPa, and three-point bending strength is 27.26 MPa. The observation of braze welding head microstructure shows that the connection interface organization between panel and core is small and uniform distribution, and attains the metallurgical connection.