Thermoplastics Manufacturing Technologies for Aerospace Applications

Thermoplastic materials have many desirable attributes for aerospace applications such as: Superior out of plane properties, impact resistance, rapid melt processing, and unlimited out time. These materials were studied for many applications the 1980’s, but never quite took hold in production, primarily due to the high production cost of autoclave processing these materials compared to thermoset composites.
Today, thermoplastics are making a strong comeback for a wide variety of airframe applications, as manufacturing process technology has advanced to allow options to economically fabric.