Development of innovative composite spoiler for single-aisle aircraft

Abstract

The sandwich is being used widely in weight-sensitive structures where high flexural rigidity is required, such as in the aerospace as flaps, spoiler, cabin floor or rotor. Sandwich structures consist of thick core material as honeycomb bonded with thin skins as carbon fibers. When the core material contains closed cells, water ingression must be considered. This water ingression may significantly increase the weight of the core inducing damages. In this thesis, a new innovative spoiler design is proposed based on reinforced stiffeners in order to avoid the use of honeycomb. In the first step, the conceptual design has been proposed by the topology tool in order to locate the stiffeners. Secondly, the preliminary design (GFEM) has been performed to extracted reaction force and first rough optimization. Thirdly, detailed design has been investigated under static and buckling results. Moreover, each ply has to be respected by aerospace stacking sequence rules. The prototype of a stiffener has been manufactured and tested under static to validate the bonding between the stiffener and rotation feature. Simulation has been successfully proposed and used to optimize the bonding by increasing the bonding surface. Finally, the total mass of the stiffener is 30% higher than honeycomb spoiler.

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