Boeing Dreamliner Woes Point to Difficulty of Using High-Tech Materials - by Andy Pasztor and Peter Sanders
Despite the steadily increased use of carbon-fiber composite parts in airlines, Boeing Co.'s disclosure Tuesday of design troubles with its 787 Dreamliner highlights the engineering, manufacturing and maintenance issues still associated with such high-tech materials. By indicating that "a relatively small number" of added internal structural supports are needed on some of the upper portions of both wings, the disclosure underscored a broader problem that the aerospace industry has recognized for a while: shortcomings in computer-design systems' abilities to precisely predict behavior of certain composite parts as they bend and twist in flight. The areas of the 787 under scrutiny involve a blend of metal and nonmetallic composite materials. Independent structural experts said Tuesday that even the most advanced computer-models sometimes have difficulty accurately predicting how stress will affect the composite parts, or where they attach to aluminum or titanium. In such circumstances, "stress paths" within or between components can be unpredictable.
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