Story ID: 322
Consolidated Structures Business Broadens Collins Reach
By: Chris Kjelgaard
Caption: Collins Aerospace merged its Aerostructures and Mechanical Systems businesses to develop advanced lightweight materials for all aerospace activities.
Word Count: 831
Aware of every aerospace sector’s growing need for lightweight, more resilient structural materials capable of operating in the harshest environments, Collins Aerospace created its new Advanced Structures business unit as a strategic initiative designed specifically to address that market opportunity, according to the unit’s leader.

Samir Mehta, formerly head of Collins’s Mechanical Systems business, assumed the presidency of the new Advanced Structures unit in January when the company merged its Mechanical Systems and Aerostructures businesses. The new unit employs about 15,000 people.

By fusing the two units’ respective capabilities and building upon them with the aid of the Dutch Thermoplastic Components business it acquired in December 2021, Collins planned to create advanced new technologies and products for all aerospace manufacturing sectors, from eVTOL aircraft to next-generation hypersonic vehicles.

Collins moved away from an organizational-silo approach. “The thought was rather to work across organization lines where [each unit’s skills] were considered to be individual distinct capabilities, to create an organization where the primary focus is to advance the strategic initiative of advancing lightweight, resilient materials,” Mehta told AIN.

Collins increasingly noticed that every one of its aerospace customers had voiced demands for lighter but more durable and resilient materials, according to Mehta. Each customer expressed different reasons for its requirements, but the demand was ubiquitous and kept growing.

“Once you have that foundational demand, by combining the capabilities of Mechanical Systems and Aerostructures, you can take the best of the best and create more complete solutions for customers,” he said. Mehta aims to further that goal by securing ample R&D investment and by rotating the engineers and designers in each Advanced Structures business among its other businesses. The approach ensures that they know each business well, so all can work together closely.

Collins’s new thinking includes leveraging the high competence it has developed in the Wheels and Brakes unit of its Mechanical Systems business in creating a very pure, highly durable formulation of carbon—which the company calls carbon-carbon—for the carbon brakes it manufactures for large commercial aircraft. The company supports the technologies under development at Raytheon to create next-generation hypersonic aircraft by sharing with the parent company details of the carbon-carbon manufacturing and technological capabilities for manufacturing heat-resistant carbon aerostructures for those vehicles.

Two other examples of Advanced Structures’ merger-reinforced capabilities not only apply to conventional aircraft applications but also to the burgeoning eVTOL sector, said Mehta.

Advanced Structures’ aerostructures business has gained extensive experience in manufacturing carbon-fiber composite materials into complex shapes that “fit appropriately to the application,” he said. The carbon-fiber engine nacelles and cowls Collins makes represent the most visible examples of that capability.

Meanwhile, the Actuation Systems part of Advanced Structures Mechanical Systems brings expertise in designing and manufacturing compound harmonic drives, powerful small electric motors used to actuate aircraft control surfaces, landing gear retraction, and nosewheel steering.

Together, those two technologies can apply to manufacturing the very thin, very strong composite wings and control surfaces of eVTOL aircraft and for the lightweight electric motors and actuators they will require, according to Mehta.

Another cross-business application under study at the Advanced Structures unit, this time for Collins’s BE Aerospace aircraft interiors business, involves using thermoplastic carbon-fiber composite materials to manufacture stronger and lighter passenger seats.

Because thermoplastic parts can be welded together into complex structures, they will not need many of the hinges, fasteners, screws, and other metal parts required by today’s airline seats made of thermoset composites or of metals. Collins continues development work on a thermoplastic economy seat 4 kg lighter than a conventional one.

Reducing seat weight by 4 kg—and not even taking into account the much greater weight reductions potentially possible for complex business-class and first-class seats—would significantly help cut an airliner’s carbon emissions, according to Mehta.

Collins has calculated that every kilogram of weight saved in an airliner seat reduces the aircraft’s CO2 emissions by 1 kg every 10 flight hours. So, for a 200-seat aircraft flying 1,000 four-hour sectors a year, a 4 kg reduction in passenger-seat weight would reduce the aircraft’s CO2 emissions by 353 metric tonnes annually—equivalent to taking 76 cars off the road for a year.

Along with merging the Aerostructures and Mechanical Systems businesses, Advanced Structures aims to cooperate with other Collins business units. Today many of Collins’s Wheels and Brakes customers prefer to pay for the carbon-carbon brakes on their airliners on a pay-per-landing basis, said Mehta. But now Collins plans to commit its Connection Aviation Solutions unit to offering airlines per-aircraft data analytics showing how the pilots of each aircraft use the brakes during taxiing and how they could reduce that safely. The arrangement would prolong brake life, reduce solid waste, emissions and maintenance, and Collins would offer customers using the service lower-cost brake payment rates.