Silent and static for the most part, the battery-powered prototypes at the Farnborough Airshow contrasted with the deafening F16 and other jets arcing across the skies above. Yet draw the crowds and selfies, they did.
Like the eye-catching EVs you see around, these craft have a distinct look about them. As this new chapter of aviation plays out, some will succeed and others will fail. Given no regulations are in place yet, there is still a whiff of the Wild West in the electric aircraft scene right now.
But this a very well-funded startup market, and that’s a factor not lost on composite maker SYENSQO, one of the three leading aviation-composite manufacturers. The Belgian maker of specialty chemicals and materials is flexing its wings after being spun out of 163-year-old Solvay eight months ago.
Advanced Air Mobility, which includes small electric aircraft, air taxis, cargo drones and delivery drones, holds a lot in store for the group such that SYENSQO sees potential for a new division alongside its defense and commercial markets. Wedded to the manufacturing cycles of Boeing and Airbus, high-performance composite makers, including competitors Hexcel and Toray, are looking to diversify their customer base by finding new markets. Overkill for tennis rackets, battery-powered planes fit the bill for these nicely.
“We do look at other pockets of growth,” Rodrigo Elizondo, president of SYENSQO’s composites business, said in an interview with chemicalESG at Farnborough.
There are some applications in electronics, in particular in smart devices, and in automotive, particularly in the interior, but “we don’t expect mass produced low- to middle-of-the-range cars to be full composite,” he added.
Electric flight will have to be almost exclusively composite to get off the ground due to their need to shed the pounds.
In the two commercial aircraft that have the highest content — the Boeing 787 and the Airbus A350 — composites still only account for an estimated 60% on the structure. By contrast, a fighter jet like the F35 is pushing close to 100%. That’s where urban air Advanced Air Mobility will be.
“Weight is everything. They can’t use a lot of metal because the battery pack would be too heavy. This could be a third leg for our growth activities alongside defense and commercial. The potential is there.”
“This will become a market, the question is when….when it will become meaningful….and my feeling is in 5 to 10 years’ time. On top of the technology, they need to make the rules. Right now, there aren’t any for this.”
SYENSQO has 100s of resin formulations for both thermoset and thermoplastic. In addition, Elizondo’s business manufactures aerospace adhesives, while the wider company is also a specialist in complementary performance polymers like PEEK used to make some aerospace parts.
It’s not always been plain sailing in composites. Materials have to juggle being lightweight, strong, durable and stiff, and the surface has in the past posed a challenge when it comes to the paint job. A couple of years ago, Qatar Airways reported paint bubbling and peeling on the surface of the wings on their Airbus 350s. The problem stemmed from the carbon-fibre reinforced composite expanding and contracting at differing rates to the coating.
A lot of investment is going into new resins as well as the manufacturing processes, application techniques and coatings.
AkzoNobel, the No. 1 supplier of coatings for aircraft structures, is working on a top coat that’s applied as a film on the composite rather than painted on. Still at the nascent stage, it opens up the prospect of coating wings and parts at the point of assembly, something that’s going down well with the carriers.
“This is new to aerospace,” AkzoNobel CEO Greg Poux-Guillaume told chemicalESG on a call. “OEMs are looking at this.”
Another challenge is raising the sustainability of composites by tackling waste and a somewhat toxic ingredients list. Elizondo spent years in chemicals working closely with the electronic and automotive industries, where manufacturing approached 99.9% efficiency, so just 0.1% waste.
“In this industry, we don’t have the scale to put robots everywhere. It’s only a few percent but if you were to add up the whole industry, it’s a lot,”” Elizondo said. “Once you have a carbon-fiber prepreg resin, if you don’t get it right first time around, it goes into the trash. If you do generate waste, you need to find a way to valorise it for lower-end applications.”
Composites are tricky to handle and they need to be easier to work with; so faster, lower-energy curing and a higher throughput. The answer lies in more automation and digitisation, alongside better manufacturing processes.
Throughput and improving application processes are especially crucial for Advanced Air Mobility as manufacturers tend to produce in relatively high volume, Elizondo said.
“There’s a lot of things to do with waste. There are plenty of projects in the pipeline. The more efficient the industry is, the more cost competitive the materials will become and the more they will be used in the market,” he said.