Guidelines for Aircraft Composite Panels

The objective of this paper is to give a general perspective and present some elementary steps for manufacturing aircraft sandwich panel composites. Composite materials have been widely used in high performance sectors of the aerospace and automotive industry, and there is considerable knowledge and confidence in their static, dynamic and crashworthiness properties. Sandwich composites are becoming more and more used in airframe structural design, mainly for their ability to substantially reduce weight while maintaining their high mechanical properties. The steps for manufacturing a sandwich composite that meets all the requirements for exploitation are very precise and rigorous, involving specific design requirements, specific materials selection and specific manufacturing conditions starting with the lay-up procedure and up to the curing process inside an autoclave. After the curing process, destructive and nondestructive tests and experiments are performed on the composite structures in order to validate the products. At the same time, this paper presents a short briefing about the implication of 3D printing technologies with high temperature resistance resins for sandwich cores used in aerospace applications.