Aircraft Industry - Boeing's 787 Dreamliner has a composite problem - by G. Blass
What's more, he says, composites allow engineers to make custom shapes, but these custom shapes compound the already difficult modeling problem. "You have many more design options, which can be both a strength and a weakness. There are many more things I can do with composite materials--add strength in specific places, take it away--but then you have combinations of both the geometry and the particular layup of the composite materials" that are unique.
Boeing's mechanical stress tests start with representative pieces (known as coupons), then move on to progressively larger parts of the structure, and finally to the full structure. Boeing puts the structural parts into huge hydraulic machines that bend and twist them to mimic stresses that go far beyond worst-expected conditions in real flights. It was during such tests that problems emerged with structural spars in the wing box.
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