Buckling-resistant double- & multi-layered shells with complex topologies for aerospace and land vehicles

Collaborative Research Program 2024-2026

The project will develop and demonstrate a technology and prototypes of a novel buckling resistant shell architecture featuring two or more skin layers reinforced by bonded intermediate corrugated sheet cores of an egg-crate morphology, providing preferential directional stiffening to allow adaptation to any desired curvature of the shell meta-structure, exhibiting locally any desired neutral, synclastic or anticlastic behaviour when bent to match the enveloping layer shape. The cores will be producible from thin sheet material in any CNC punching press, allowing the precise and cost-effective reproduction of any custom pattern. Aluminium, Titanium and Steel alloys will be fused using a custom brazing process under the combined effect of pre-compression and heat, to achieve bond strength similar to the base metal. High-performance GFRPs will be fused heterogeneously by epoxy adhesives and cured under pressure and, where necessary a controlled heat influx) in a similar layout, to minimize defect occurrence.