Carbon fiber reinforced plastics in aircraft construction

Fibrous composites have found applications in aircraft from the first flight of the Wright Brothers' Flyer 1, in North Carolina on December 17th, 1903, to the plethora of uses now enjoyed by them on both military and civil aircraft, in addition to more exotic applications on unmanned aerial vehicles, space launchers, and satellites. Their growing use has arisen from their high specific strength and stiffness, when compared to the more conventional materials, and the ability to shape and tailor their structure to produce more aerodynamically efficient structural configurations. In this paper, it is argued that fiber reinforced polymers, especially carbon fiber reinforced plastics can and will in the future contribute more than 50% of the structural mass of an aircraft. However, affordability is the key to survival in aerospace manufacturing, whether civil or military, and therefore effort should be devoted to analysis and computational simulation of the manufacturing and assembly process as well as the simulation of the performance of the structure, since they are intimately connected.