Boeing Dreamliner delay — composite design problems

I’m eagerly looking forward to my first trip in a Dreamliner. So I’ve wondered what was behind the announced six-month delay. Boeing has found structural failures in their testing of the composite wing box. Composites of this complexity are a whole new engineering challenge. The relatively simple composite structures used in our catamaran “Adagio” can be analyzed by FEA (Finite Element Analysis). Evidently the Boeing designs are too complex to define precisely, so the problems are likely hidden in the abstractions they had to make.

1 Response to “Boeing Dreamliner delay — composite design problems”


  1. 1 PL

    No matter how good your FEA software is, or how simple your composite structure is… Nothing will truly show the strength and fatigue properties of composites better then destructive testing.

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