In 2005, the USAF awarded to BladeCo LLC, a corporate predecessor to FE Associates, a Phase I SBIR contract to develop data processing technology that would help predict the behavior of composite aircraft parts caused by repairs that were making reinstallation of the repaired parts onto the aircraft from which they were removed either difficult or impossible.

Specifically, the data processing applications developed under the Phase I SBIR:

• automatically calculated the deformations of composite aircraft part repairs due to their residual forces, stresses, and strains, and also
• automatically determined the location and extent of structural modifications required to neutralize those self-induced deformations
• applied stochastic design improvement techniques to assess the sensitivity and stability of the repairs and structural modifications.

The B-1 horizontal tail leading edge was the focus of this project. This composite part included a multilayer shell with chordwise ply drops at each station underlain with structural foam and an aluminum alloy backbone. The part also featured spanwise variations in numbers of plies, ply dropoff location, and section size. The contractor extracted needed structural definition and geometry from part assembly drawings. Engineering definition of the composite materials involved in the repair was collected from the approved material vendors.

U.S. Navy photo by Lt. Marques Jackson