Carbon-Fiber Planes

02004-12-30 | Uncategorized | 5 comments

Boing is building their new 7E7 Dreamliner using Carbon-fiber, instead of Aluminum and other metals. I wonder what that will mean for future crashes, because carbon-fiber breaks into horribly sharp shards. For that reason F-1 racing cars, which have been built using carbon-fiber for years, now have to enclose the carbon-fiber in another plastic that should keep it from coming apart in dangerous shards. Anybody know anything about how Boing is using carbon-fiber?

PS: Tito found this interesting article about the Dreamliner.
Thanks Tito!

5 Comments

  1. Tito Martinez

    I don’t know why these companies want to experiment with these composite materials. Do you remember a while back, when the Australian sailing team had their ship made out of graphite? The thing split in two during competition. It just so happens that graphite is quite strong when taking pressure from one angle only, but quite frail when it takes pressure from various angles at the same time. I imagine the same is true for carbon fiber. It is a man made matrerial. I guess you can say the same thing about some of the alloys that are used today for many of the things that we consider good and durable.

    My guess is that Boeing will probably not use carbon fiber for the entire structure, but rather for critical parts of the plane that can afford to be lighter in weight and that will not take pressure from multiple angles. This is quite interesting. Let me see if I can find something on the web.

    Reply
  2. Tito Martinez

    Ooops! I don’t know how my post got posted three times. Can you delete two of them?

    Reply

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