Aerospace & Defence
Plastic and printed electronics in aerospace
4 Steven Bowns examines the potential impact of plastic and printed technologies in aerospace electrical and electronic systems.
4 Steven Bowns étudie l’impact potentiel du plastique et des technologies imprimées dans les systèmes électriques et électroniques de l’aérospatiale.
4 Steven Bowns untersucht den potentiellen Einfluss von Kunststoff und gedruckten Technologien auf elektrische und elektronische Systeme in der Luftfahrt.
F
ew commentators can have failed to notice the great leap in military capability that has been delivered by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) over the past
15 years. UAVs have jumped from effectively large model aircraft curiosities like the British Army’s Phoenix in the 1990s, to a critical element of military capability today. This capability leap has been achieved
partially by a large investment in R&D but also by a multitude of innovations from outside defence. Examples range from ducted fan technology to new electronics technologies that we will examine in this article. Removal of the human pilot has also
removed many of the flight safety process constraints, allowing UAV engineers to take greater risks, with consequent greater performance returns. The drive for ever higher levels of endurance, speed, stability and payload in UAVs and the ability to exceed the 7G limit of human endurance has focussed attention on mass and driven the adoption of many weight reduction technologies. This in turn has resulted in a widening of the technology gap between military and civil aerospace.
In contrast, over the same period, the increasingly complex and burdensome regulatory standards for civil aircraft require that any new technology have a significant and proven track record before it can be adopted. In other words, it must not be new. Accordingly, the civil aerospace sector has been considered by many component and system manufacturers to be slow moving, where quality control and conformance to standards are paramount, with cost and innovation secondary. Despite this trend, the increases in oil
price over the past few years have seen the civil aerospace sector focus again on weight reduction. The cost of aviation fuel has doubled since 2006 and increased almost four fold since 2001. Fuel is typically an airline’s single largest operating cost and the increased cost of fuel has bitten hard into most operators’ margins. Fuel efficiency is directly linked to aircraft weight. Roughly, a 1 per cent reduction in aircraft weight equates to a 1 per cent increase in fuel efficiency. This might not seem significant until one considers that for an operator such as the combined BA & Iberia, its 2011 fuel costs will exceed 1 billion Euros. Reducing the weight of its
Fig. 1. The Royal Air Force’s ‘Reaper’ unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).
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