Thermoplastics

En esta área trabajamos fundamentalmente en el desarrollo de soluciones para la industria, fundamentalmente aeronáutica, con materiales compuestos termoplásticos.

Fidamc participates in projects under direct customer order, but most of them are financed, they are European Clean Aviation projects.

Specifically, in this area we work on the fine-tuning of the manufacture of components that are currently made with thermosetting composite material or metal to assess the suitability of the process to be carried out with thermoplastic composite. To do this, we analyse the advantages and disadvantages, from the point of view of the process and of the material itself, whether through its response to loads, weight savings, future possibilities of recyclability, energy expenditure caused by the manufacturing process, properties achievable with one manufacturing process or another, etc.

These manufacturing processes include automatic lamination with in-situ consolidation, consolidation and forming processes in presses, consolidation and forming in ovens and welding by conduction and induction, with equipment in our facilities. In addition, at Fidamc we work with other partners in processes such as continuous compression, stamping or overmolding, with the aim of expanding capabilities and also to evaluate possible improvements to be applied, both in terms of process and equipment.

In recent years, two projects have been carried out with European funding: OUTCOME and LPA, which have made it possible to generate demonstrators of a wing upper skin (4m) and a fuselage section (not forming part of the MFFD demonstrator, but forming part of the overall project). Both parts have been tested at loads typical of these components with satisfactory results from the point of view of inter-comparison with previous FEM simulations.

The OUTCOME part was nominated for the JEC 2024 awards and the LPA work will be presented in future calls.

Six people are employed in this area and one intern is working on his Master's thesis. All of them are engineers with degrees in different disciplines: aeronautical, industrial, chemical and materials engineers. Two of the members of the department are PhDs and one member is going to carry out his thesis work in relation to thermoplastic welding.

In Fidamc we will continue to work on manufacturing processes to make them competitive from the point of view of productivity compared to thermosetting. There are three European projects underway where we will manufacture a stiffened leading edge, being a part of greater geometric complexity than those previously executed, and an access door to an APU (auxiliary power unit). Given that the use of these materials compared to thermosets has not yet been demonstrated, our challenge is to find their niche application, to locate the process-material-component combination where their contribution is relevant.

We are also working on the basis and characterisation of this material and on its recyclability properties, we are developing projects with universities where recovered material from manufactured parts is used to generate others with lower mechanical requirements.