DEVELOPMENT AND TESTING OF A LOW-COST INTEGRATED RTM HORIZONTAL STABILIZER

Future commercial and military rotorcraft programs will rely heavily on finding successful high-performance, low-cost design solutions. To achieve lower life-cycle cost, candidate advanced manufacturing technologies must be proposed and evaluated. Several advanced composite concepts were proposed and evaluated for a commercial horizontal stabilizer application. These approaches were primarily focused on reducing detail part cost and assembly complexity of the current stabilizer. A one piece, multi-spar design was selected. The production design had multiple detail subassemblies that were eliminated with the integrated resin transfer molding (RTM) approach. The new design maintains the original continuous airfoil section pass-through approach previously used, but the redundancy at the tailboom attachment has been reduced. Details of the static and fatigue test results will also be addressed as well as the final tooling, fabrication, inspection, and repair of the component.