Advanced Materials for Aerospace

Dear Colleagues,

Airframe manufacturers are beginning to consider the possibility of moving away from conventional composite laminate designs, but need further evidence that non-conventional designs can lead to weight savings, improve performance and reduce manufacturing times.

New research suggesting that replacing standard ply laminates (with 0°, ±45° and 90° ply orientations) with non-standard or double angle-ply laminates (with ±ψ and ±ϕ ply orientations) offers potential improvements in strength and ease of manufacture. The emergence of thin ply material, consisting of non-crimp fabrics (with two or more layers of uni-directional material stitched through their thickness) or woven cloth with very low crimp through the use of spread tow manufacturing technology also introduces game changing opportunities for design. However, whilst multi-layered architectures offer greater efficiencies in layer deposition rates and spread tow technology brings design flexibilities found only in thick laminate construction into the thin laminate domain, the design rules for conventional laminate designs are no longer generally applicable.

Contributions are solicited, which demonstrate performance improvements of non-conventional over conventional laminate designs with respect to either buckling, vibration, strength, damage tolerance and/or thermal shape stability characteristics. The non-conventional designs should also satisfy, where possible, the manufacturability constraints applied to conventional designs, including design heuristics, such as ply percentages and/or ply contiguity constraints, and thickness tapering.

Dr. Christopher York
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Aerospace is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• standard ply laminates
• non-standard laminates
• double angle-ply laminates
• non-crimp fabrics
• thin ply material
• spread tow manufacturing
• woven cloth
• very low crimp
• multi-layered architectures
• buckling
• vibration
• strength
• damage tolerance
• thermal shape stability
• design heuristics
• ply percentages
• ply contiguity
• thickness tapering.