Engineering for the future: weight saving and cost reduction initiatives

Abstract

Over the past several years, Pechiney has launched intensive R&D activities, in close connection with its main customers, aimed at tailoring property balances to specific applications and at reducing the overall cost of manufactured aircraft parts. These close partnerships led to the development of a number of new alloys and tempers covering all the major aircraft structural parts, all of them bringing benefits in one or more design properties, and all of them having being chosen for new aircraft. Similarly, new special qualities were designed to reduce customer costs: low residual stress, high formability, age formable and weldable solutions were developed and chosen for their efficiency in lean manufacturing. It is the purpose of this paper to review these cost reduction and weight saving initiatives conducted by Pechiney. The main design property improvements for the newly developed alloys and tempers and practical applications of the special material qualities will be reported. In addition, the underlying metallurgical principles of the performance improvements will be discussed.