Composite materials for primary aircraft structures: from development phase to high volume production rate

From 1980's decade, the introduction of carbon composite materials in structural applications has been consistently increased in the successive generations of civil aircraft from Single Aisle to Middle-long Range to achieve a culminant point with more than 50% in structure weight in recent commercial civil aircraft. This evolution, done through successive iterations, has been possible by combining in the same time the improvement of intrinsic composite material performances and its transformation into prepreg production technologies together with the development of new manufacturing process for material lay-up automation at composite shop-floor manufacturer of aircraft composite parts. New challenges are still coming to continuously develop materials and technologies in order to pursue the production more cost-effective composite parts. Associated to higher aircraft production rate for single aisle, new challenges may force material and aircraft designers and producers to furthermore drive new products and processes introduction and new ways of transformation within in next decade of composite aircraft designs. We propose to illustrate these trends using past and recent developments and our return of experience from Hexcel on Civil Aircraft programs.