Hairmate - Hybrid Aircraft Seating Manufacturing and Testing

Motivation

Traditional aircraft seats are manufactured with internal metallic structures that are covered with plastic panels and cushions. These structures consist of a metallic frame made of two main beams with cross ribs mounted on top of the legs. This configuration usually involves heavyweight parts. This metallic structure is normally divided into the primary structure (legs, tubes and cross beams to achieve dynamic aircraft seat tests) and the secondary structure (the components to support tray-table, headrest, footrest and armrest).
New tendencies are starting to use carbon fibre reinforced polymer (CFRP) based parts to manufacture the economy class aircraft seating. Some patents and commercial designs use monocoque and semi-monocoque CFRP backrests and seat bases. 

Objectives

• Maximum 10 kg weight to seating in economy class: Creating resource-efficient transport that respects the environment. Beyond 2020, new efforts are needed to get within reach of the Flightpath 2050 targets of a 75% cut in CO2, 90% in NOx and a 65% noise reduction.
• Ensuring safe and seamless mobility. Aviation provides invaluable time-efficient mobility. New concepts can aid the Air Transport System (ATS) in meeting evolving mobility needs of citizens: more efficient use of local airports, faster connections, and less congestion.
• Building industrial leadership in Europe. Clean Sky 2 will help maintain highly skilled jobs in Europe by enabling European industry to deliver the necessary innovations based on affordable and sustainable technologies. This will be supported by design tools and methods, program and supply-chain management, and certification processes that will shorten time-to-market.
• Functional integration in light-weight design, multi-functionality, energy and material efficient during use phase, cost efficient production by reducing complexity of components and manufacturing time.

Content

The objective in HAIRD project was to create a new aircraft economy class seat with a design focused in low cost mass production, low maintenance, environmentally friendly and healthy comfort (reduce passenger DTV risk). The HAIRD seating design does not use tubes, hybrid legs or complex geometries, although its design aims to achieve the 16g impact test according to SAE ARP5526D -2017, SAE ARP5765A-2017 and SAE AS8049C-2017. The HAIRD design has a cost effective and innovative geometry leg design only manufactured CFRP with metallic inserts for join leg to the seat base and the rails on the airplane. 

Methodology

HAIRMATE will design and manufacture the moulds to manufacture a light-weight aircraft seating that will improve ergonomic aspects, aesthetics and comfort using efficient manufacture processes and low-cost carbon-fibre based materials. Moreover, a new material will be characterized to re-compute the FEM model and improve the behaviour of the seating structure. Also, some dynamic tests for aircraft seating under impacts of 16g and 14g will be done. For this reason, engineering and seating design will be carried out simultanesouly with numerical tools to ensure the minimum number of experimental dynamic test loops.

Expected results

In HAIRMATE project, the activities will be focused on the design and manufacturing of the moulds to manufacture and test the new generation seating designed during the HAIRD project by LEITAT. Despite the fact that the conventional technologies are used to design a new generation aircraft seating, only a virtual model than verifies the system has been developed. As a result, this will place HAIRMATE project starting point on a main Technology Readiness Level of 6 (TRL 6) and a final overall TRL 7 is expected. In HAIRMATE the challenge will be faced by well-known technologies to manufacture and to test the future aircraft seating through the development of an integrated pilot product to demonstrate its viability (TRL 7).

• LEITAT - Coordinator
• ALPEX Technologies GmbH
• Universitat de Girona

 Funding program: JTI Clean Sky II