Development of fibre metal laminates for advanced aerospace structures

Fibre metal laminates offer significant improvements over current available materials for aircraft structures. While weight reduction and improved damage tolerance characteristics were the prime drivers to develop these new family of materials, it turns out that they have additional benefits which become more and more important for today's designers, e.g, cost reduction and improved safety. The combination of these aspects in one material is an extraordinary achievement. It shows that GLARE is a unique material for aircraft applications. Moreover, it makes clear that, through its unique combination of properties, GLARE is a strong candidate material for fuselage skin structures of the new generation of aircraft. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.