Clean Sky’s Composite Fuselage project, part of the Regional Aircraft Innovative Aircraft Demonstrator Platform (IADP), aims to develop technologies that are suitable for an advanced regional aircraft fuselage and to integrate and validate them up to full scale demonstrator level. The demonstrators (there are in fact two, one for the structure and one for the cabin interior), are being produced at Leonardo in the form of full-scale fuselage barrels which are representative of a forward fuselage section, just aft of the aircraft cockpit. The project focuses around innovative low cost and low weight composites, advanced manufacturing and assembling processes, and structural monitoring.

”Aircraft affordability is a critical parameter for regional airlines, and in the Composite Fuselage project, technology-wise, we are using a new approach, focusing on the materials and how to integrate all the fuselage’s design elements together with the new doors, new windows, frames and a new floor grid” says Ruud Den Boer, Project Officer at Clean Sky, adding that ”production automation is also a very important parameter to support that, manifesting itself in such processes as automatic fibre placement and component integration”.

Maintainability is an important factor too, so integrated health monitoring – similar to what is available in road vehicles – is also a consideration within this project: ”We are using very small sensors which are integrated into the composite material which can monitor and measure the health of the fuselage, which will help predict when maintenance is required. Embedded sensors in the fuselage will also detect if there is an impact such as a bird-strike or interaction with debris on landings. All of this will lead to the reduction of maintenance costs when eventually used in a production aircraft. But for now it is a technology development to assess if we can really produce this technology economically” says Den Boer.