Hexcel Corp. (Stamford, Conn., U.S.) has successfully qualified its HexWeb HRH-10 aerospace honeycomb through the National Center for Advanced Materials Performance (NCAMP), administered by Wichita State University’s National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR, Wichita, Kan., U.S.). The qualification establishes what Hexcel deems the “aerospace industry’s first NCAMP database for honeycomb core materials,” providing engineers with design-ready material data to streamline structural design, reduce qualification costs and accelerate the adoption of advanced composite structures.
“As aerospace manufacturers work to bring increasingly advanced aircraft, launch vehicles and other aerospace platforms to market, access to trusted engineering data is becoming as important as access to the materials themselves,” says Lyndon Smith, president, Americas and global fibers, Hexcel. “This qualification reflects Hexcel’s commitment to making advanced composites more accessible and accelerating innovation across the aerospace ecosystem.”
The qualification extends the proven NCAMP approach beyond composite prepreg systems and makes publicly available engineering data accessible for a widely used aerospace honeycomb material. Hexcel’s HRH-10 honeycomb was selected as the baseline material for the collaborative industry effort to establish a common qualification framework for honeycomb core materials.
The publicly available NCAMP database provides engineers with trusted material data and a common material specification that can be used to support structural design and development. By leveraging a shared qualification database, organizations can reduce the time, cost and effort associated with generating qualification data independently while gaining greater confidence in material selection and structural analysis. The qualification effort also generated additional engineering data to support the design of lightweight honeycomb structures across a range of aerospace applications. The HexWeb HRH-10 qualification database will be available through NCAMP resources published by NIAR.
As a vertically integrated supplier of advanced composites, Hexcel provides customers with a broad portfolio of aerospace materials, including carbon fiber, prepregs, honeycomb core and engineered composite structures.
Source | Hexcel Corp.
