Cessna employees discuss new aircraft skin technology. (L to R) Richard Boone, senior project engineer, Engineering; Shannon Jones, engineer specialist, Engineering; and Vicki Johnson, advanced design engineer, Engineering.
Seeking Future Benefits NASA hopes to realize benefits from these concepts by the 2030 timeframe, also called the “N+3” timeframe, referencing technology designed for aircraft three generations hence. “It’s up to industry to take the knowledge and technologies we help develop and put them into production aircraft,” says Siochi. Cessna calls its research project
“STAR-C2,” representing six characteristics of aircraft surfaces: smoothness, thermal, absorption (of impact and acoustics), reflectivity (of ultraviolet radiation), conductive (lightning protection), and cosmetic (color and appearance). The company’s testing is to evaluate those characteristics in protective skins made
with various materials. Currently, many of an aircraft’s
environmental countermeasures are incorporated in its structural design and construction, according to Dr. Vicki Johnson, senior engineering specialist at Cessna and the NASA project’s principal investigator. The result, she says, is excess weight from the “over-design of the traditional composite structure” to account for hot, wet environments and impacts. “We have a target that for all the
protective skins, the weight would be no more than 0.275 pounds [0.125 kg] per square foot of fuselage area,” she adds. Cessna’s target also is to develop STAR-C2 skins that are no more than a quarter inch (0.63 cm) thick, though ones that include
a layer of foam may have to be thicker, Johnson concedes. One of Cessna’s goals is to determine how many layers and what combination of materials would best satisfy requirements for an aircraft’s environmental protection. The company intends to include a “shell” layer that, upon impact, would cause the damage “to spread and not affect one area significantly,” says Johnson. “How the layers are connected to each other will be an important consideration in the manufacturing of the skins.” Transferring environmental countermeasures from structure to skin could improve aircraft performance significantly. Protective skins would reduce an aircraft’s weight by eliminating the
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