Acronimo: ADVANCE
Titolo: ADhesiVe free Fibre Metal LAminates fabricatioN for aerospaCE applications
Responsabile scientifico: dott. Enrico SIMONETTO - Dipartimento di Ingegneria Industriale-Università degli Studi di PADOVA
Coordinatore: prof.ssa Giovanna ROTELLA – LUM “Giuseppe Degennaro”
Partner-Unità di ricerca: Dipartimento di Ingegneria Industriale-Università degli Studi di PADOVA – Università della CALABRIA
Bando: PRIN 2022 - Decreto Direttoriale n. 104 del 02-02-2022
Durata: 28/09/2023 – 27/09/2025 (24 mesi)
Budget totale progetto: € 197.255,00

Abstract del progetto

Actual technologies to produce Fibre Metal Laminates (FML) involve a series of inefficient procedures and techniques which make them difficult to be massively employed. Furthermore, complications arise when shapes more complex need to be fabricated and issues such as delamination or discontinuities at metal/composite interface reduce the reliability and quality of the products increasing the scrap rate and the costs associated with the production. Thus, it is necessary to design the process chain for FML, especially when critical applications such as aerospace one are involved, in order to obtain reliable, safe and high-quality products. Such components are candidates for many different uses in aircraft production making research in this field attractive. The project aims to screen and analyze various stages of production and proposing a different process chain avoiding, for example, the use of adhesives to manufacture FLM parts with thermoplastic-based reinforced polymers as inner core. The first stage will involve the functionalization of metal substrates in order to tremendously increase their adhesion properties and make the overall FML production methodology more efficient. Also, surface characterization will be carefully made to select the functionalization methods and parameters able to complain with the requests. Afterwards, an innovative customized hot-pressing process will be carried out to fabricate and form different shape of FML without the use of adhesives, taking advantages of both thermoplastics’ properties and the high-performance functionalized surface. All the production stages will be methodically studied and properly set up in order to acquire useful information about their influence at each production phase. Surfaces will be functionalized by means of different processes: mechanical chemical and physical ones and their combination in order to screen all the possible methods and allowing to select the most suitable one according to the specific need. Also, hot pressing processes will be deeply investigated and modified in order to obtain the highest possible performance of the final product. Furthermore, numerical models will be developed in order to explain, based on the physics of the involved processes, the phenomena occurring at the microscale between interfaces which, in

turn, are responsible of the bond strength and durability. Finally, post processing operations will be performed in order to make the produced FML suitable for industrial applications. Two industrial case studies will be developed producing two prototypes of aircraft components, namely a Ti-based FML wing panel and an Al-based FML upper fuselage component. Three research units will participate and actively cooperate for the project development and success with complementary competences and research background. The groundbreaking nature of the process ensures that the impacts at both scientific and industrial level will be high.