All-phenolic sandwich structures for aircraft interior applications

摘要

Nowadays most of the AIRBUS interior parts are glass fiber reinforced sandwich structures made of phenolic prepregs and honeycomb cores. In the past many efforts have been made to substitute this concerning raw material and processing - comparably expensive method of construction. Some of them are presented. However, the requirements concerning fire behavior, the mechanical demands as well as processing problems and/or too high raw material costs have prevented their introduction into series production. One possible solution is the new all-phenolic sandwich concept, which is discussed in this article relating to the use for overhead stowage compartment (OSC) doors. It is shown that novel syntactic and expandable semi-syntactic phenolic foams have an outstanding fire behavior due to the phenolic matrix and are moldable to thin-walled, complex shaped sandwich cores, which meet the mechanical requirements. Even the mechanical performance of sandwich constructions with these phenolic foam cores and prepreg covering layers were found to fulfil the industrial standards. Moreover, a new processing concept is introduced, which allows to manufacture all-phenolic sandwich laminates in one single processing step. Using this so-called One-Step Sandwich Molding (OSSM) technique sandwich structures with mechanical properties close to a honeycomb construction could also be realized.