European space transportation and aeronautic industries both face big challenges in the materialsand technologies domain, due to the fact that current families of civil and military launchers andshort-range civil aircraft will be upgraded or replaced in the next decades. To meet therequirements of their new developments and programs, Astrium and Airbus gather their efforts todevelop efficient processing technologies, especially based on out-of-autoclave technologies,such as radiation curing of composite or thermoplastic materials processing.Since 15 years, the promising potential of high energy radiation curing for the production of highperformance composites has stimulated very significant basic studies on the kinetics of electronbeam-initiated (EB) cross-linking polymerization, on the physical properties of the resultingmaterials, on resin toughness and fiber/matrix interface improvement. The major challenge of EBcuring for high performance composites today is the industrialization of all the research works.Airbus and Astrium, together with a fibre and prepreg manufacturer (Hexcel Composites) andwith an academic partner are deeply engaged in the development of the EB curing material andassociated processes, with a specific emphasis on integrated layer-by-layer deposition and lowenergy electron-beam curing of composites. Airbus has installed such a dedicated developmentmachine that is today fully operational in Getafe, Spain. Combining the lay up and curing steps isapplicable to both the filament winding and the automatic tow placement technologies. It caneven bring additional advantages to the classical one shot EB out-of-autoclave technology, suchas: capability of manufacturing structures of very large dimensions at lower cost, capability ofachieving very important component thickness and homogeneous material growth.
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