Plastic & Printed Electronics Technology in Aerospace

n this article, Steven Bowns, Managing Director of Technology Futures examines the potential impact of plastic and printed technologies in aerospace electrical and electronic systems. Few commentators can have failed to notice the great leap in military capability that has been delivered by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) over the last 15 years. UAVs have jumped from effectively large model aircraft curiosities like the British Army’s Phoenix in the 1990’s to a critical element of military capability today. This capability leap has been achieved partially by a large investment in R&D but also by a multitude of innovations from outside defence. Examples range from ducted fan technology to new electronics technologies that we will examine in this article. Removal of the human pilot has also removed many of the flight safety process constraints, allowing UAV engineers to take greater risks, with consequent greater performance returns. The drive for ever higher levels of endurance, speed, stability and payload in UAVs and the ability to exceed the 7G limit of human endurance has focussed attention on mass and driven the adoption of many weight reduction technologies. This in turn has resulted in widening of the technology gap between military and civil aerospace. Predator Image In contrast, over the same period the increasingly complex and burdensome regulatory standards for civil aircraft require that any new technology have a significant and proven track record before it can be adopted. In other words, it must not be new. Accordingly, the civil aerospace sector has been considered by many component and system manufacturers to be slow moving, where quality control and conformance to standards are paramount, with cost and innovation secondary. Despite this trend, the increases in oil price over the last few years have seen the civil aerospace sector focus again on weight reduction. The cost of aviation fuel has doubled since 2006 and increased almost four fold since 2001. Fuel is typically an airline’s single largest operating cost and the increased cost of fuel has bitten hard in to most operators’ margins. Fuel efficiency is directly linked to aircraft weight. Roughly, a 1% reduction in aircraft weight equates to a 1% increase in fuel efficiency. This might not seem significant until one considers that for an operator such as the combined BA & Iberia, its 2011 fuel costs will exceed 1 billion Euros. Reducing the weight of its aircraft fleet by 10% would add Euro100M/year to its bottom line. Airline operators are facing fierce commercial pressure and this is being transmitted to the aircraft manufacturers and designers. There is now a degree of immediacy in demands for weight and cost reduction, which coincides with a raft of proven weight reduction technology in the military UAV sector. Due to the long lead times and regulatory constraints of the airframe itself, this pressure is likely to be transmitted onto the component and system manufacturers. It remains to be seen whether they are able to rise to the challenge of transferring and delivering this military UAV technology across to the civil aerospace sector. Many of the more obvious candidates for weight reduction – such as airframe and landing gear – have been trimmed to such an extent that there is nothing more to work at. Attention is now turning towards less obvious areas – not least of which is actuation and control systems which can account for up 15% of an aircraft’s weight. In a move to meet these new demands, there has been a marked trend away from hydraulically powered actuation and control to electrical power. The use of electromechanical systems as a lightweight alternative to hydraulics was identified as far back as 1979 by NASA. More recently the UK government funded an £11M study called ELGEAR, or Electric Landing Gear Extension and Retraction, for UK industry to develop electrical actuation technology. The transition to elect