Abstract
The exhaustive use of light advanced polymer composites into the development of the future high-efficiency long-range commercial aircrafts (primary) structures for increasing strength while decreasing weight for lower fuel consumption and less pollution has attracted great attention in the last decade. In this context, solutions for the integration and joining composites into the aircraft structures metallic sub-assemblies or components, while providing the necessary strength to sustain heavily loaded joints, are urgently required. The paper comes to meet an area of interest for many researchers and large integrators and manufacturers, by presenting several type of metallic join geometrical designs, along with metallic joint part integration solutions into a composite structure directly during production. Performances evaluation of the developed metallic join geometrical designs was performed in static regime by means of „pull-out” compressive tests. The paper focuses on the strength of the hybrid metallic/advanced polymer composites joints. It was concluded that an efficient design of the metallic joint and a proper transition from hybrid to the composite structure can lead to proper integration solutions while assuring safety requirements.
Keywords: metallic inserts; geometrical design; hybrid carbon reinforced polymeric composite; metallic joints; vacuum assisted thermal processing