Plastic Film Rolls

Composite class: developing the Airbus A350-XWB

The future is plastics, as the young Dustin Hoffman was memorably told in the 1960s classic film The Graduate. For the aerospace industry, it was certainly some distance into the future. It’s only now, more than 40 years later, that polymers are starting to make serious inroads in the construction of aircraft; but the era of the plastic plane is well and truly with us. Boeing’s 787, the first major airliner to be predominantly made from composites, is expected to be certified later this year. Meanwhile, the Airbus A350 XWB, which also makes heavy use of the lightweight material, is currently in the final stages of preparation before a planned first flight in 2013.

The XWB in the designation stands for ’extra-wide body’, and the A350’s cabin will seat nine abreast in standard class and eight in premium class the company claims that each seat will be 1.3cm wider than the equivalent configuration of the aircraft’s chief competitor, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. In fact, the entire concept of the aircraft was originally conceived as a response to the Boeing 787. Initially proposing an updated version of its previous wide-body jet, the A330, the company responded to criticism of a lack of ambition by launching a programme to design a lighter-weight, more aerodynamic airliner that could match the Dreamliner’s claimed 25 per cent reduction in fuel consumption compared with its predecessor.

In fact, the company has ended up designing an aircraft that will compete more with the Boeing 777 than the Dreamliner, as it’s a slightly larger aircraft; the A350 family will seat 270-440 people, to the 787’s 210-330. There are three aircraft in the A350 family, with the basic model actually being the middle one, designated the A350 XWB-900, with a 65m-long fuselage and a maximum take-off weight of 268 tonnes; the smaller -800 is a shortened-fuselage variant, while the larger -1000 is stretched.

The A350 also has a slightly higher proportion of composites in its construction than the Dreamliner 53 per cent, as opposed to 50 per cent. The remaining 47 per cent is composed of titanium and aluminium-lithium alloy. Most parts of the aircraft are a mixture of composite and alloy; in the wings, the main metal components are inter-spar ribs (the spars being the supporting structures running along the wing from tip to root, and the ribs running across the width of the structure). In the fuselage, the outer skin panels are carbon fibre, as is the frame, although the frame includes aluminium strips to ensure that lightning strikes can be dissipated. The supporting cross beams are metallic.

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