Development of test methodology to measure in-service durability of elastomeric tooling

摘要

Elastomeric tooling (ET) is used to fabricate composite parts of various sizes and shapes, in order to either intensify or redistribute the pressure during a molding cycle. ET can be made of several types of rubber materials that are typically expensive, hence considerably increasing the overall aircraft manufacturing cost, particularly in the case of large commercial airplanes, including a large number of composite material parts.