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Material World
Industry

Aerospace manufacture

Where weight is worth paying for — the industry that makes exotic materials ordinary and pays the price for them.

Building aircraft, spacecraft and their engines, under a constraint no other industry has to the same degree: every kilogram carried costs fuel for the whole life of the airframe, so a material that saves weight can justify a price that would be absurd anywhere else.

That arithmetic is why titanium, nickel superalloys, aluminium-lithium, carbon fibre composites and PEEK are aerospace materials before they are anything else. The second constraint is temperature — a turbine's hot section runs above the melting point of the alloy it is made from, which is only possible because of internal cooling and ceramic coatings.

History

Wood and fabric until the 1930s, then aluminium, which the industry effectively created a market for: Duralumin made the all-metal aircraft possible and the aircraft made aluminium a commodity.

Jet engines from the 1940s created the nickel superalloy industry, because no existing material survived the turbine inlet. Composites moved from secondary structure to primary structure over the 1980s and 1990s, and the Boeing 787 and Airbus A350 are the point at which a wing and fuselage became more composite than metal.

Economic significance

Small by tonnage and enormous by value, which is what makes it the proving ground for expensive materials. A civil airliner programme costs more than a small country's budget and runs for decades, so material qualification is measured in years and a qualified supplier is close to irreplaceable.

It is also where the supply-risk argument bites hardest: titanium sponge, rhenium for superalloys and carbon fibre precursor all have very few producers, and aerospace is exposed to every one of them.

Medium confidence Weak evidence

How we know: checked recently · only one source, so there is nothing to cross-check it against · stated directly by the source.

How this connects

Where a connection has been confirmed by an outside reference, that reference is named beside it.

uses

  • 7000 series aluminium alloy — alloy · wing skins, spars and fuselage frames — the application the family was created for
  • Ti-6Al-4V — alloy · airframe fittings, landing gear and the cooler sections of engines
  • Nickel superalloy — alloy · the turbine hot section, which runs above the alloy's own melting point and only works because of internal cooling and ceramic coating
  • Carbon fibre — material · primary structure since the 1990s — a modern wide-body wing and fuselage are more composite than metal
  • PEEK — material · brackets, clips and cable insulation, displacing aluminium for weight and to avoid galvanic corrosion against carbon fibre
  • Aramid fibre — material · composite reinforcement and, in its meta form, cabin interior textiles
  • Forging — process · turbine discs and landing gear, among the most highly stressed components made
  • Carbon fibre composite — material · primary structure — a modern wide-body wing and fuselage are more composite than metal
  • Turbine blade — object · and the capability is the casting yield and the coating rather than the alloy, whose composition is published — which is why jet engines are a three-company industry

Sources

  • Material World
    Our own writing
  • Wikidata
    Wikimedia Foundation · Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (public domain dedication)

Questions this page answers

Where it comes from, and what it becomes

Follow Aerospace manufacture back to what it starts as, and forward into what it becomes. Each step is a documented one — a real route material takes, not a chain of inference.

Upstream — what it comes from

  • Aerospace manufacture → uses (primary structure since the 1990s — a modern wide-body wing and fuselage are more composite than metal) → Carbon fibre → is composed of (carbonised from a polymer precursor until little but carbon remains) → Carbon → is produced by (as synthetic graphite, made by driving the reaction past silicon carbide until the silicon boils away and leaves the carbon behind) → Acheson process → takes as input (sand and coke, heated to 2,500 °C, which is how silicon carbide has been made since 1893) → Sand → is composed of (almost everywhere, because quartz is what is left when everything else in a rock has weathered away — though a volcanic beach is basalt grains and a tropical one is broken shell) → Quartz
  • Aerospace manufacture → uses (the turbine hot section, which runs above the alloy's own melting point and only works because of internal cooling and ceramic coating) → Nickel superalloy → is composed of (with titanium, the elements that form the strengthening phase — a few per cent, and the whole mechanism) → Aluminium → is extracted from (via alumina — bauxite is refined by the Bayer process before smelting) → Bauxite → is sourced from (the residue of prolonged tropical weathering, which strips the silica and alkalis out of an aluminosilicate rock and leaves the aluminium behind — basalt is one common parent among several) → Basalt → is composed of (an early-crystallising constituent of basaltic magma) → Olivine
  • Aerospace manufacture → uses (brackets, clips and cable insulation, displacing aluminium for weight and to avoid galvanic corrosion against carbon fibre) → PEEK → is produced by (a step-growth polymerisation between aromatic monomers at high temperature in a polar solvent) → Polymerisation → takes as input (as vinyl chloride, which is why more than half of PVC's weight is salt rather than oil) → Chlorine → is produced by (at the anode) → Chlor-alkali electrolysis → takes as input (as brine; the salt is the feedstock for both products at once) → Halite
  • Aerospace manufacture → uses (composite reinforcement and, in its meta form, cabin interior textiles) → Aramid fibre → is produced by (condensation polymerisation into a rigid-rod polymer that is then spun from a liquid crystalline solution in sulfuric acid) → Polymerisation → takes as input (as vinyl chloride, which is why more than half of PVC's weight is salt rather than oil) → Chlorine → is produced by (at the anode) → Chlor-alkali electrolysis → takes as input (as brine; the salt is the feedstock for both products at once) → Halite
  • Aerospace manufacture → uses (wing skins, spars and fuselage frames — the application the family was created for) → 7000 series aluminium alloy → is produced by (zinc and magnesium into aluminium, then solution treated and aged — the strength comes from the heat treatment, not from the melt) → Alloying and melting → takes as input (the base metal of both brass and bronze) → Copper → is produced by (as blister copper, refined electrolytically afterwards) → Smelting → takes as input (roasted to drive off sulfur, then reduced to copper) → Chalcopyrite
  • Aerospace manufacture → uses (airframe fittings, landing gear and the cooler sections of engines) → Ti-6Al-4V → is produced by (melted under vacuum or inert gas, because molten titanium reacts with essentially every crucible material and with air) → Alloying and melting → takes as input (the base metal of both brass and bronze) → Copper → is produced by (as blister copper, refined electrolytically afterwards) → Smelting → takes as input (roasted to drive off sulfur, then reduced to copper) → Chalcopyrite

These are the most distinct paths back. Aerospace manufacture can be traced through others besides.