Improved Lifetime Performance of Nonmetallic Honeycomb Cored and Modified Aluminum Cored Honeycomb Structures

"Aurora Flight Sciences of West Virginia (AWV) is small business offering a complete range of aerospace structural manufacturing capabilities in both metals and composites. Our largest customer is Northrop Grumman, for whom we manufacture flight-ratedproduction parts for such aircraft as the E8 JSTARS, E2C HawkEye, and RQ4A Global Hawk. We are ISO-9000 registered and we hold materiel review board (MRB) authority on JSTARS. Many of our staff of almost 100 are former Grumman employees, and have extensiveexperience with the F14, A6, and other aircraft We are developing new sealing techniques to improve the resistance of aluminum cored sandwich structures to moisture penetration, which is a major cause of delaminating and life shortening. In this SBIR, wehave teamed with Northrop-Grumman ISA to offer a complete design solution that can rapidly transfer the resulting technology into production. In Phase I we propose to conduct preliminary evaluations of new nonmetallic core materials which could replacealuminum honeycomb core and accelerated life testing of our sealing techniques. In Phase II we will demonstrate production versions of our processes. As a major supplier to the OEM on the F-14 and other subject aircraft, Aurora West Virginia is wellpositioned to quickly transition the technology from this project into production and into the fleet. Aurora has teamed with Northrop Grumman, and together we offer a complete understanding of