The LOCOMACHS project aims to develop and demonstrate the feasibility of new part production manufacturing and assembly operations of composite and hybrid aero-structures parts. To achieve the ambitious LOCOMACHS objectives, it is necessary to gather expertise in a wide range of skills, and, in order to reach the highest possible impact, the main stakeholders in the field.

The LOCOMACHS Consortium has been drawn up in this spirit and gathers 30 partners covering the full range of the value chain, from early design and development (process, method, software and hardware tools providers), to skills and facilities needed for manufacturing and assembly. Such a coherent set of competencies would be very difficult to find at national level with the same level of expertise in all fields.

The consortium include:

• Prime OEM aircraft manufacturers, as well as several tier-one and tier-two suppliers to European and overseas prime OEM aircraft manufacturers.
• Research institutes like Airbus Group Innovations, DLR and NLR, that will provide state of the art knowledge within composite material and manufacturing. Other institutes like the MTC and TECNALIA will contribute with research skills and hardware for demonstrations within the area of assembly automation.
• SME companies like Prodtex and SONAXIS have unique competences within assembly tooling and NDI/NDT respectively.
• Universities from several European countries, each of them internationally recognized for the quality of their scientific work,  like ENS Cachan and CTH, who possess the most advanced computer aided systems and skills for geometrical variation management.  

Meggit

Further Information : http://www.meggitt.com

Organizational Activities

Meggit (previously Cobham) designs, develops, manufactures and tests composite structures and high performance radomes for the Aerospace, Defence and Communications markets. Meggit delivers a complete design to instillation solution for airborne, naval and land based platforms and benefits from extensive experience in the design and manufacture of high performance composite structures for challenging environments.

Role in the Project

Meggit’s participation in SP1 will draw upon experience in design and manufacture of high temperature composite structures to develop and validate design methodologies to fully predict laminate behaviour for components with high temperature/pressure cure profiles up to 320°C. The developed models will combine the effects of materials, tooling and cure profile. Meggit’s participation in WP21 will investigate the optimisation of integrating metallic or composite features and fittings into composite structures through co-curing and co-bonding to reduce post moulding assembly operations. Design procedures and mechanical performance predictions will be validated through production of representative sub-assemblies for test.

Key skills