Autoclave forming of thermoplastic composite parts

Thermoplastic advanced composites are of great interest for meeting the needs of new challenges in the aerospace industry. Thermoplastics offer a number of important advantages over thermosets like better toughness and damage tolerance, rapid fabrication cycle and the possibility of assembling substructures by welding. Progress has been made by INTA in setting up the autoclave forming technologies for the manufacturing of thermoplastic composite parts. The standard autoclaving and vacuum bagging techniques, which are well developed for the production of thermoset composite components, have been adapted to the high-temperature processing of thermoplastics. Some demonstrators based on actual aeronautical skin substructures have been fabricated. Present paper summarises the results obtained in this work.