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It is a demonstration article for a co-cured wing or control surface. We actually have over 30 plus customer flying platforms that use similar methodologies.

The thickness of the fuselage is .1 to .175.

@@HawthornComposites in mm or cm

What I believe you are seeing is the lighting reflection and not the surface finish of the laminate. If you look at the photo of the CLEAVER itself, you'll see the surface quality is quite nice.

There is not necessarily a limit on potential wing length. It really comes down to making sure you have the time to fully "wet-out" the composite fabric before it starts to gel. There are plenty of variables to play with to ensure success for much larger wings.

@@HawthornComposites thank you for the answer !

which are the better ways? using prepreg

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We put a film over top of the fabric and our automated ply cutter table has built in vacuum, which keeps the composite material firmly in place during the cutting process.

Shape memory polymer resin combined with our trade secret fabrics and manufacturing methodologies.

Typically Smart Tools will last between 50 to 70 cycles

Our smart tools are made of proprietary fabric and a shape memory polymer resin that is actually a epoxy thermoset. You can learn more about it here: ua-cam.com/users/SmartTooling

This is a representative part that could be a control surface on a business jet or wing on a small UAV. In regards to automation, Smart Tooling (ua-cam.com/users/SmartTooling) is compatible with robotic handling, automated fabric placement methods, automated mold opening/closing, and automated infusion.

Air bleed* through between control surface and main wing

In this technique the resin is drawn into the carbon under vacuum inside an oven. The chances of air bubbles is small. This technique also does not require use of an autoclave oven. Boeing uses a sort of similar process in Australia making 787 parts with good success after a slow start.

@@bradster1708 now I wonder how resin behaves when I send it through a heated nozzle ( 3d printer, or due to friction ) into vacuum. Does it evaporate? Below some pressure a lot of materials are either solid or gaseous. Chemical Vapor Deposition. Then as the pressure due to the resin itself rises, the new resin going through the nozzle stays liquid.

Because the polymer tools can apply pressure both during infusion and cure, any air is driven out of the curing composite. This solution deploys automated carbon fiber sleevings and isotropic broad good to eliminate most of the labor that would be associated with applying carbon fiber prepreg.

I imagine such methods aren't precise enough for aviation, so you need a mold wither way.

What we have found is that if you a making more than 6 parts, a Smart Tooling solution will be less expensive than using machined foam, because precision machined foam is so expensive

@@HawthornComposites 3D printed dissolvable foam. Much more geometry could be added to lighten and strengthen the parts

We'll leave that to your discretion ;) watch more magic at ua-cam.com/users/SmartTooling

I don't know about difficulty. Can you elaborate? But issues with variability would definitely be a problem. It's not like you could easily make adjustments to such "smart tools", right? So everytime you'd need to swap the tools out for different ones, you'd need to pay quite a lot of money, as you're locked into their ecosystem of tools. But I guess the aviation industry doesn't care about costs as much as your average small business owner. Hell, even the cheapest Russian airlines don't care about any cost under 2000$ when it comes to repairing their planes.

@@diviscadilek1764 Difficulty with things like mold alignment and multi-piece molds, trying to get consistent resin flow through the entire carbon fiber piece, warping and thickness problems. "Difficulty" and "variability" have a lot of overlap, but in general there's a reason people don't use injection molding for parts that are meters long. I could see the cost going up exponentially as the size of the piece increases. For that roughly 1m square demonstration its not too bad, but for a 10 meter wing or flight control surface or even something like a monocoque chassis for a vehicle, these squishy inflatable mold pieces don't seem like they would scale well.

The solution deployed for this wing is very scalable to much larger parts, we use similar technology to make a approximately 12ft (3.7 meter) inlet duct for Kratos Valkyrie tactical UAV www.compositesworld.com/news/hawthorn-composites-awarded-structural-inlet-duct-manufacturing-contract- and we also made the wings and fuselage for the same vehicle afresearchlab.com/news/aerospace-systems-directorate-collaborates-with-partners-to-build-innovative-airframe/

@@HawthornComposites Thanks for responding. From my perspective it looked like it had a lot of the drawbacks of injection molding as far as scalability went, but if you're making 4m production parts its doable at least. I could be wrong but I'm going to guess that it wouldn't be cost competitive with other composite manufacturing for less defense oriented project budgets like medium scale wind turbines? Also: I miss the DoD days when people knew how to name projects. "Longbow Apache" makes sense. "Kratos Valkyrie" sounds like someone isn't even trying to pick names from the same sets of mythology.

Apparently, it costs less than the traditional way of manufacturing carbon fibre composites

We did achieve a 67% reduction in labor hours in producing the inlet duct for the Kratos Valkyrie tactical UAV using a similar solution www.compositesworld.com/news/hawthorn-composites-awarded-structural-inlet-duct-manufacturing-contract-

It’s a real french word btw

I can see that, but t's done that way for higher quality. The higher the quality the less chance for failure. And the FAA doesn't care about what you have to pay to get a part that won't fail.

I hope the efficency of manufacturing gets improved upon. This looks promising. It would be nice to have affordable carbon fibre products.

We agree that a lot of this process could be automated, but this is a self-funded demonstration so we're not going to fund all the automation. You can check out another case study where we did use a self-heated out of oven/out of autoclave mold smarttooling.com/portfolio/co-cured-i-beam-using-bladder-smart-tools/