Boeing to use North Sails 3DL technology

by Chicago Tribune and Sail-World.com on 17 Apr 2005 Sailing technology may change the face of aviation, as Boeing strives to build carbon fibre jetliners.

Its North Sails 3DL technology, but no we are not going to fly the skies with a 3DL carbon main, with that familar blue sticker.

As the composite cross over gathers speed, Boeing is adapting the North Sails 3DL-rm technology, a revolutionary rotary moulding process, that produces sails primarily for the smaller One Design classes.

Boeing Co. doesn't often let the public into its secured development center here. But on Tuesday, after months of bad news about defense scandals, trade wars and lost sales, the Chicago-based company finally had something to crow about.

While the television cameras rolled, Boeing engineers unveiled a seamless, rivetless, one- piece barrel of carbon-fiber composite that has the unmistakable profile of a jumbo jet's back end.

At 22 feet long and 19 feet in diameter, it is a crucial first step in a multibillion-dollar march to prove that the company can build its much anticipated 7E7 Dreamliner, the first passenger jet produced largely from the same kind of reinforced plastic used to make sailing boat componentry.

‘This is probably one of the two or three major milestones. ... for commercial aviation's second century of flight,’ boasted Walt Gillette, the 7E7's chief engineer.

But the inside story of how Boeing set out to build this new, plastic plane, and how it has turned many doubters into believers, provides a vivid snapshot of how a major company innovates to stay competitive in a global economy.

It also highlights the rich stakes involved in one of the most remarkable industrial battles in the history of commerce: a clash of corporate titans for supremacy in the skies.

The threat.

In 2003, Airbus delivered more commercial jets than Boeing for the first time.

If Boeing engineers can solve the puzzle of building successfully with composites, they will eliminate hundreds of thousands of rivets, hours of machining time, and billions of dollars in expensive manufacturing machinery.

That, in turn, should allow Boeing to price its new jet more competitively. Boeing has collected 126 orders for the new 7E7. And it is trying to mitigate its risk by outsourcing much of the jet's production to a set of industrial partners around the world.

In a brightly lit office at 7E7 headquarters in Everett, Wash., Walt Gillette stands at a whiteboard drawing pictures of the fuselage barrels that comprise the body of a jet. At 62, he is the elder statesman of Boeing engineers.

The fuselage of an airplane, he explained, is built around a hollow, cylindrical skeleton. It looks like a birdcage laid on its side. Narrow hoops called ‘frames’ trace the circumference of the cage.

‘Stringers’ run lengthwise, perpendicular to the frames. To form the jet's smooth, aerodynamic exterior, this lattice is enclosed by ‘skins,’ which are attached to the outside of the structure.

At less than a quarter-inch thick in most places, these skins seem distressingly thin.

But if they were any thicker, the airplane would never get off the ground. Weight, of course, is of paramount concern to an aerospace engineer.

And that's where composites come in. Skins, frames and stringers made out of carbon fiber are lighter than aluminum but just as sturdy.

Making the cage and its cover out of composites can reduce the airplane's heft dramatically while increasing its strength.

Composites confer other advantages as well. The biggest wear and tear on an aluminum airplane comes from pressurizing and depressurizing the cabin thousands of times over a lifetime of takeoffs and landings.

Inflating the fuselage like a balloon to achieve cabin pressure wears on the aluminum skeleton and the joints between the hundreds of metallic skin panels.

Corrosive moisture also builds up inside a jet.

Over time, this all adds up to maintenance. A composite fuselage, on the other hand, won't corrode and can withstand much greater pressure.

That means it can be blown up to the equivalent of 6,000 feet of altitude rather than 8,000 feet, which can help decrease fatigue on long flights without increasing an airline's maintenance budget.

Stronger, more resilient carbon also means the 7E7 can have a more humid cabin and bigger windows--a big plus for passengers.

And because composite structures are built by laying out thousands of thin ribbons of carbon fiber soaked in epoxy, the material can be more versatile to use.

While aluminum comes in sheets or chunks that must be machined into shape, composites can be ‘laid up’ in any direction or thickness to achieve the desired strength and shape. So if Gillette is right about composites, why weren't commercial jets built out of carbon fiber long ago? The answer is simple:

Nobody has figured out how to do it cheaply or safely enough. Boeing and others have built military jets out of composites for years. But those are like exotic racecars--expense is not the issue.

Airbus’s engineers are very skeptical. The task of proving them wrong has fallen largely to Frank Statkus, the Boeing 7E7 program's chief technologist.

Like most Boeing executives, Statkus would like people to think he doesn't give a hoot what Airbus executives think. But in a conversation about composites, he briefly let his annoyance show. ‘The other guy's saying he can't do it. So let him say that,’ Statkus said. ‘He can't do it because he can't. We can do it because we can.’

Getting comfortable with composites, he said, is all a matter of knowing what you're capable of. ‘It's not hard,’ he said. ‘You just have to stop thinking of metal. I mean, really, that's it.

Stop thinking of metal.’ Not so long ago, even Boeing engineers found this hard to swallow.

As recently as spring of 2003, a surprising number of people in the Boeing engineering corps were just as skeptical. Boeing had gone public months earlier with a plan to develop a 767 replacement out of composites that would deliver 20 percent better fuel efficiency and much longer range.

The only catch: Nobody in the building knew how to get it done. ‘This is a journey none of us has been on,’ Gillette said. ‘There's no answer in the back of the book.’

If the engineers could invent a way to make a single, monolithic piece of composite for each barrel, the benefits would be enormous. Not only would single-piece barrels make for a lighter- weight airplane, they also would ensure that manufacturing one would be cheaper and faster.

No rivets. No assembly. No expensive tools to hold pieces in place while they were being bolted together.

Once Statkus and the other converts saw the possibilities, there was no turning back. So Statkus sequestered engineers from Boeing and its partners in a room filled with clay, cardboard and other modeling materials. Their mandate: Come up with a way to build a one-piece barrel. ‘We only opened the door to give them doughnuts,’ Statkus said with a laugh.

Statkus and Deb Limb, the executive in charge of fuselage development, began poking around for more efficient ways to apply the sticky ribbons of carbon-fiber fabric soaked in epoxy.

Typically, the ribbons are applied in layers by hand or by robot in long strips that are less than a foot wide.

The Boeing executives found what they were looking for in the oddest of places: a sail making company. North Sails Group LLC, one of the premier designers of lightweight composite sails for racing boats, had developed a machine that applies composite strips to a spinning barrel using multiple robotic tape-laying heads.

The method was fast and, most important, scalable to something much bigger than a mainsail or jib.

‘We thought, `Why not wrap tape around a big tube?'‘ Limb said. Boeing quickly licensed the technology from North Sails.

But Statkus and Limb still had a problem: They needed something as big as an