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Fabrication and assembly of the majority of control surfaces for Boeing’s 777X airplane is completed at the Boeing Defense, Space and Security (BDS) site in St. Louis, Missouri. The former 777 airplane has been revamped to compete with affordability goals and contentious markets requiring cost-effective production technologies with high maturity and reliability. With tens of thousands of fasteners per shipset, the tasks of drilling, countersinking, hole inspection, and temporary fastener installation are automated. Additionally and wherever possible, blueprint fasteners are automatically installed. Initial production is supported by four (4) Electroimpact robotic systems embedded into a pulse-line production system requiring strategic processing and safeguarding solutions to manage several key layout, build and product flow constraints.

Environmental Control Systems (ECS) ducts on airplanes are primarily fabricated from aluminum or thermoset composites, depending on temperature and pressure requirements. It is imperative to fabricate lightweight, cost effective, durable, and repairable systems with minimal tooling. It is also important that the duct systems are easy to assemble even with alignment issues resulting from structural variations, tolerance accumulation, variation from thermal expansion of different materials, and inherent duct stiffness. These requirements create an opportunity and need for a technology that can address all of these issues, while increasing performance at the same time. This report provides a background on current ECS ducting systems.

This white paper will outline the material and processes, which have been developed for the fabrication and application of an integrated composite firewall primary structure for use in military and commercial aircraft. Military and commercial aircraft have requirements to protect occupants from fire. One specific fire protection requirement is to contain a (1100°C/2000°F) flame for 15 minutes. This protection on composites is usually provided by a metallic firewall attached to the composite structure. The integrated ceramic composite firewall is an improvement over existing metallic firewall technology. This technology reduces cost, part count, weight, and manufacturing complexity of composites, which require fire protection. The integrated ceramic composite firewall material and process incorporates ceramic fabric and film adhesive into one unique material.

Fastening metallic structure for aerospace applications is relatively straightforward and has been done for some time. Dealing with advanced composites, though, requires a significantly different technological approach, especially primary structure. Although composite material utilization has increased enormously in civil and military aircraft in recent years, the application of composite materials to primary aircraft structure has not kept pace and is still greeted with some skepticism in the aerospace community. In particular, no major transport manufacturer has yet employed composite components for fuselage or wing primary structure. This appears to be changing rather rapidly with the introduction and the evolution of new airframes such as the 7E7 and Blended Wing Body (BWB) concepts.

Friction Stir Welding (FSW) can achieve high quality welds in aluminum alloys that are of interest to the aerospace industry (e.g. alloys 2014, 2219, 7050 and numerous aluminum-lithium alloys). The low distortion solid-phase welds exhibit metallurgical and mechanical properties, including fatigue, which are superior to conventional fusion welds achieved by arc processes. FSW, although a relatively new welding technique, has been systematically developed and proved by The Welding Institute (TWI) under contract to an international group of sponsors, one of which is The Boeing Company. To further validate the process, The Boeing Company conducted separate development activities including detailed mechanical testing of welds made from the FSW process.