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Brighton Science Blog
Topic: Aerospace
Adhesive Bonding vs. Mechanical Fastening in Product Design: The Pros and Cons
When cooking up their next great product, designers and manufacturers are constantly looking for ways to produce the highest-performing products while keeping assembly and materials costs low.
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The Solution to Costly Aircraft Paint Adhesion Failure
The importance of understanding surface quality and being able to measure it in an accurate, reliable, and demonstrable way is important for ensuring a high-quality finish and, ultimately, a high-quality product. Any manufacturer that is not able to do this increases their risk of producing...
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Top Challenges Product Development Teams Experience When Bringing a Product Concept to Manufacturing
Modern product development is fraught with challenges due in large part to the sophistication and complexity of the various elements that go into a final product – everything from materials and surface geometries to coatings, bonding, and even staff skills and competencies. Pitfalls await even the...
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How to Avoid Polymeric Coating Failure Which Leads to Corrosion in Materials
We know that plastics are in nearly everything these days, but we don’t often think about how plastics are also on nearly everything. Polymer coatings are as common as the latex paint covering the walls of your house. For industrial use, polymeric coatings have been protecting and beautifying...
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A Great Idea to Help Save the Aerospace Industry
2020 is a year that will live in infamy for many industries. We haven't even seen the full effect of Covid-19 on economies, which inserts a heap of uncertainty into decision making for manufacturers. But one thing is for sure: we're not going to get back to business as usual anytime soon. The ...
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Effective Strategies for Efficient and Reliable Manufacturing That Can’t Wait
Today, manufacturing requires a paradigm shift from reactionary whack-a-mole problem correction to taking a holistic approach. The mutually reliant elements of manufacturing are interwoven in both obvious and invisible ways. From supply chain communication to equipment dependability and from ...
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The Huge Need for Zero Defect, Large Scale Molding Processes
Manufacturing large-scale molded products such as pools, boats, and aircraft parts is as herculean a process as the products they generate. Colossal molds are used to form fiberglass and other composites into aircraft wing panels, fuselages, boat hulls, bus shells, and pools. The proper...
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How to Get a Stronger Weld Through Cleaning
Even though we look around us and see plastic everywhere, in every shape and imaginable application, metals are still a more commonly used raw material in machined products. Metals are the legacy material of choice due to their strength and relative ease of bonding, but advances in polymers are...
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3 Things You Need to Know to Create Strong, Reliable Bonds With Laser Cleaning
Manufacturers are always looking to create stronger, more durable, more reliable, and in the automotive and aerospace sectors, lightweight products. In this pursuit, they’ve often upgraded and swapped out material systems for metal alloys that have a lower density, better temperature tolerance, and...
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Demystifying the Greatest Metal Brazing Process Challenges
When thinking about what manufacturing looks like, most people envision sparks flying, metal clanking and fires blazing. This isn’t too far off the mark since metals have been used for bonding joints together to build larger, sturdier and more stable structures since before the first Industrial...
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Topcoat to Primer Surface Reliability for Aircraft Painting
Adhesion problems don’t have a preference when it comes to the kind of damage they cause. Whether the end result is structural or cosmetic, adhesion-related failure headaches for manufacturers abound. For aircraft OEMs, one of the most crucial aesthetic operations is the topcoat of paint, although...
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Surface Quality in Aircraft Sealing and Bonding for Repairs
When an aircraft is manufactured, every single portion of the plane or jet is designed to be able to be serviced and repaired for the next 20-30 years. Aircraft manufacturing OEMs are building aircraft with the expectation that extensive repairs will have to be done later down the road. This is an...
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Surface Preparation for Primer Coating of Composites in Aerospace Applications
A lot goes into painting an aircraft. This massive, multi-stage process begins long before that final, shiny topcoat you see on the wings and tail is applied. The components are molded, then they’re prepared (which is often a multi-step process in-and-of itself), then they’re assembled, then there...
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Surface Treatment of Thermoplastics for Aerospace Components
The Aerospace and Defense Industry is experiencing a market boom right now. Investments in the aerospace industry are an increasingly significant part of the world economy. Last year, almost $1 trillion was spent worldwide with about $400 billion spent directly on aircraft and space systems...
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Identifying Adhesive Bond Failure Points in Manufacturing
Adhesion processes vary widely across different industries that incorporate bonding, sealing, printing, coating, painting or cleaning into their manufacturing operations. Every adhesion process is constructed differently based upon what the product being manufactured requires. However, all...
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New and Better Surface Quality Test Than the Water Break
There are times when trying to discern if adhesion in manufacturing will succeed seems like a deeply mysterious and opaque puzzle. The water break test is a simple and fairly straight-forward method of detecting hydrophobic (water-repellant) contaminants on surfaces, most commonly on flat sheets of...
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Brighton Science's Exceptional Lab: Experts in Advanced Materials and Processes
Brighton Science Lab Capabilities The history of Brighton Science (formerly BTG Labs) is rooted in adhesion research. Originally a development lab, Brighton Science specialized in plasma polymerized coatings. The engineers worked with coatings containing corrosion-resistant and anti-microbial...
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