Location
Description
Date
15/07/2019 - 17/07/2019
Description
EASA hosts a Composite Materials Handbook – 17 (CMH-17) Volume 3 Chapter 12 (V3C12) ‘Damage Resistance, Durability, and Damage Tolerance’ Task Group (TG) working meeting 15-17th July 2019.
Information regarding CMH-17 can be found at: https://www.cmh17.org/
The 15th July agenda provides an introduction/tutorial for those not familiar with CMH-17, and in particular the developing activities of the CMH-17 DT TG
This TG, supporting not only CMH-17 Volume 3 Chapters 12 (V3C12), but also Chapters 13, 14, and 17, and has been key to improving the understanding and standardisation of potential approaches to composite damage tolerance, e.g. in support of showing compliance with CS25.571 and interpreting AMC 20-29 etc.
This working meeting was used to focus upon development of new and revised content for the next revision to V3C12. Such working meetings are essential to progress, providing useful content for broader awareness meetings.
Recent history has required that focus be upon large passenger aircraft, necessary following the certification and entry into service of A350 and B787. This change in application exposed many organisations throughout design, production, and in-service to composites for the first time. However, recognising that many smaller organisations, typically being resource challenged, are not so able to travel to international meetings as larger organisation may be able to do, EASA used this opportunity to offer involvement to a broader and more local industry and to encourage consideration of the possibility of organising localised working groups to represent specific product interests including rotorcraft, propulsion, General Aviation (GA) etc, possibly using complimentary shared database activities etc.
The intend to expand the scope of such activity has been indicated by EASA in presentations made at its recent GA and Rotorcraft Structures Workshops.
The importance of working group activities, such as CMH-17, is becoming increasingly important to industry as regulation moves towards ‘performance’ based regulation and Level of Involvement (LoI) strategies are adopted. Industry is starting to recognise this at CMH-17 and Airbus (which has provided support for CMH-17 for a considerable time), has recently significantly increased its engagement accordingly.
EASA is prepared to develop this process for future European meetings, subject to European Industry interest.