This paper summarises a series of small scale tests carried out to evaluate and model the postcrash fire integrity of composite aircraft fuselage structures. The US Federal Aviation Administration regulations for the penetration of an external fuel fire into an aircraft cabin after crash require a burn-through period of 4 min (FAA 1 25?856 Appendix F, Part VII). Different candidate structures for the next generation of composite aircraft fuselage, provided by EADS, were investigated, including CFRP monolithic laminate and a folded core CFRP sandwich. Those materials were subjected to constant heat flux from a propane gas burner, while being held under compressive load in a small, specially designed compression test rig with antibuckling guides. The sample time to failure was measured, along with the temperatures at various points through the thickness. Modelling the thermal and structural behaviour under load required the use of a modified version of the Henderson equation, which describes heat transfer through composites under ablative fire conditions. This has been incorporated into the Com_Fire software model. Kinetic parameters for the resin decomposition reaction were determined from thermogravimetric data and other thermal parameters, conductivity and diffusivity, were measured experimentally. The paper will examine measured and modelled behaviour of the CFRP monolithic laminate.

This paper summarizes a series of small-scale tests carried out to evaluate and model the post-crash fire integrity of composite aircraft fuselage structures.The US Federal Aviation Administration regulations for the penetration of an external fuel fire into an aircraft cabin after crash require a burn-through period of 4 min (FAA § 25.856 Appendix F, Part VII). Different candidate structures for the next generation of composite aircraft fuselage, provided by Airbus, were investigated, including CFRP monolithic laminate and a folded-core CFRP sandwich. Those materials were subjected to constant heat flux from a propane gas burner, while being held under compressive load in a small, specially designed compression test rig with anti-buckling guides. The propane burner was calibrated to produce a constant heat flux up to 182 kW/m 2 . The sample time-to-failure was measured, along with the temperatures at various points through the thickness.Modelling the thermal and structural behaviour under load required the use of a modified version of the Henderson Equation, which describes heat transfer through composites under ablative fire conditions. This has been incorporated into the Com-Fire software model. Kinetic parameters for the resin decomposition reaction were determined from thermo-gravimetric data and other thermal parameters, conductivity and diffusivity were measured experimentally. The paper will compare the behaviour of single and double-skinned structures and will examine measured and modelled behaviour.

The influence of fiber-matrix adhesion on the linear viscoelastic creep behavior of ‘as received’ and ‘surface modified’ carbon fibers (AR-CF and SM-CF, respectively) reinforced polyphenylene sulfide (PPS) composite materials was investigated. Short-term tensile creep tests were performed on ±45° specimens under six different isothermal conditions, 40, 50, 60, 65, 70 and 75 °C. Physical aging effects were evaluated on both systems using the short-term test method established by Struik. The results showed that the shapes of the curves were affected neither by physical aging nor by the test temperature, allowing then superposition to be made. A unified model was proposed with a single physical aging and temperature-dependent shift factor, . It was suggested that the surface treatment carried out in SM-CF/PPS had two major effects on the creep response of CF/PPS composites at a reference temperature of 40 °C: a lowering of the initial compliance of about 25 % and a slowing down of the creep response of about 1.1 decade.