FUTURED. ZAL Magazin 2025

SFS
SUSTAINABLE
MATERIAL
MANAGEMENT
12
Learn more
about SFS here.
Back in the day, materials were chosen in
the aviation industry based on maximum
safety and high performance with minimum
weight. The focus was on the impact
of each component on “its” environment,
not what making, operating and disposing
it meant for our environment.
The aviation industry has been undergoing a
change of view on this in the past few years, realizing
that ecological footprints have to be a
major factor in all decisions. SFS is closely examining
ways of manufacturing its products in a
way that uses fewer resources and increasing
the recyclability of the materials used.
RAFINESS is a German-Austrian project with
eight corporate partners that has set itself the
goal of achieving “environmentally friendly aviation”
with the aid of robot-guided additive manufacturing
on cabin sandwich structures. Taking
an aircraft luggage rack as an example, a concept
was developed for how to optimize future
brackets for lightweight structures and integrate
them into honeycomb structures.
The biggest challenge for SFS was to cut the
number of materials in existing fastening systems
for aircraft luggage racks and replace them
with a single recyclable and bio-based multigrade
polymer. Analysis quickly revealed that no
single material can meet all the requirements.
Modern cabin components are acoustically separated
from the fuselage structure, so as not to
transmit the noise of the engines and air flow
inside. Unfortunately, the properties of the materials
used for damping elements are very often
the opposite of those that ensure fuselage
and cabin are firmly connected.
MATERIALS THAT CAN BE
RECYCLED ARE KEY TO
MAKING EFFECTIVE USE OF
NATURAL RESOURCES.
Conventional damping elements: “shock mounts”
made of silicone rubber (VMQ) and aluminum.