Page 31 - AAA APRIL - MAY 2017 Online Magazine

Mro FeAtUre AEROSPACE COATING

requirements and demands from aerospace used on production A350-1000 jetliners as The robot will able to handle the largest
coatings from OEMs, airline operators and well. This is due to the fact that the two new commercial jetliner in service today, the
MRO providers. In 2015, aerospace coating sealants have demonstrated considerable Airbus A380 due to its design which features
provider, PPG Industries announced that it weight savings (as much as 30 percent) an autonomously controlled mobile base
had developed a solar-heat-management when compared to traditional sealants, with and with a reach of 25 meters and a weight
coating system. attendant benefits in fuel economy. PPG of 48 ton. This also makes the largest robot
The company claims that the new paint has also developed a selectively strippable in the world. LR Systems expects to deliver
technology can lead to a reduction in the system for coating. This reduces the aircraft 8 systems per year to customers world-wide
temperature of the aircraft’s external skin downtime by about 30 to 40 percent at the not only to the aerospace sector but also
by up to 25 degrees F. This is return helps time of repainting as only the intermediate to other sectors, such maritime, oil & gas,
lower the interior cabin temperatures of coating, basecoat and clearcoat need to be transport etc.
the aircraft by as much as five to seven removed for new applications, leaving the
degrees. “Airlines often avoid dark colours primer and the underlying base primer intact. Non-Stick Coatings
for airplane liveries because they can absorb Bug contamination on the wings of
as much as 90 percent of solar energy, which Removing the Layers commercial aircraft cause increased drag,
in turn heats the interior while a plane is Large Robotic Solutions (LR Systems) will resulting in greater fuel consumption and
on the ground,” says Mark Cancilla, PPG bring to market in 2017 its Laser Coating increased emissions. The issue has certainly
global director for aerospace coatings. “Our Removal (LCR) robot, which will mark a proven to be a sticky subject and studies
innovative paint technology means airlines paradigm shift in aerospace paint stripping. have been underway since the 60s to find a
no longer have to avoid dark colours. In A 20-kW laser will be deployed by the LCR viable and workable solution to this problem.
fact, the darker the colour, the greater the which will allow it to perform the paint Studies have shown that bug splatter and
difference there is in total solar reflectance. stripping tasks on any commercial or military other factors that cause drag can increase
There is no compromise of other coating aircraft regardless of the size and with very airplane fuel consumption by as much as
properties.” In another development, in high levels of accuracy. The robot allows 30 percent. A NASA team has been working
November 2016, Airbus had one of its three a much faster and cleaner process (50 on this issue and early results have proved
Airbus A350-1000 flight-test aircraft painted percent faster than traditional methods) and promising. “Laminar aircraft wings are
with new coatings developed by PPG that will contributes to a significant improvement in designed to be aerodynamically efficient,”
result in a reduction of the repaint cycle time labour conditions and to a reduction of CO2 says Mia Siochi, senior materials scientist at
for the jetliner. Airbus used PPG’s Desothane emissions by up to 85 percent. LR Systems NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton,
HD 9008 basecoat-clearcoat for one of the is slated to deliver its first LCR robot to a Virginia. “If you have bugs accumulating, it
A350-1000s. PPG’s low-density fuel tank launch customer in the 2nd Quarter of 2017. causes the airflow to trip from smooth or
and fuselage sealant were also used on all The company says that full scale production laminar to turbulent, causing additional drag.
three flight-test aircraft and will now be commenced in the 4th Quarter of 2016. An aircraft that’s designed to have laminar
wings flying long distance can save five to
six percent in fuel usage. Surprisingly, all you
need are little bugs that trip the flow and you
lose part of this benefit.” NASA researchers
have been experimenting with various non-
stick coatings on Boeing’s ecoDemonstrator
757 and in 2015, researchers with the
Environmentally Responsible Aviation (ERA)
Project assessed the performance of five
different coatings they had developed. “One
of the five coating/surface combinations
showed especially promising results,” says
Fay Collier, ERA project manager. “There still
is a lot of research to be done, but early data
indicated one coating had about a 40 percent
reduction in bug counts and residue compared
to a control surface mounted next to it.”

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