MIT Produces Aviation-Grade Composites With No Ovens or Autoclaves

Thursday, January 16, 2020 at 05:16 PM ET

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MIT postdoc Jeonyoon Lee has been leading on the program. Melanie Gonick/MIT

Key Takeaways:

Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are developing a method to produce aerospace-grade composites without the enormous ovens and pressure vessels currently used in the process. The technique may help to speed up the manufacturing of airplanes and other large, high-performance composite structures, such as blades for wind turbines. The researchers detail their new method in a paper published in the journal Advanced Materials Interfaces.

Dan Pimentel

Dan Pimentel is an instrument-rated private pilot and former airplane owner who has been flying since 1996. As an aviation journalist and photographer, he has covered all aspects of the general and business aviation communities for a long list of major aviation magazines, newspapers and websites. He has never met a flying machine that he didn’t like, and has written about his love of aviation for years on his Airplanista blog. For 10 years until 2019, he hosted the popular ‘Oshbash’ social media meetup events at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh.