Aircraft Skin Aluminum Alloy

Early airplanes used materials such as linen, cloth, canvas, etc., to make aircraft skins. However, modern aircraft generally use metal skins because of their structural strength, including the aerodynamic load it bears. The performance of aircraft skin aluminum alloy is very good, because the weight of aluminum alloy is very light. Relatively speaking, the aluminum alloy metal is not so lively and easy to process. Therefore, most of the current military aircraft and civilian aircraft in the world use aluminum alloy for aircraft skin manufacturing.

The general flight time of an aircraft is more than one hour. Whether in summer or winter, the aircraft skin must withstand the high temperature generated by the aircraft at high speed. The longer the aircraft sailing time, the higher the temperature resistance. The cooling effect and resistant to high temperature of traditional aircraft skin cannot meet people's requirements. Therefore, it is necessary to use aircraft skin materials with good heat resistance, high toughness, and long service life of safe products. One of the important problems of aircraft in increasing the speed of navigation is the degradation of material performance caused by the long-term increase in skin temperature. The aircraft aluminum alloy for skin can be made of 2000 series hard aluminum alloy, such as 2a12 aluminum plate, 2024 aluminum plate and so on.

2A12 aluminum alloy is a high-strength hard aluminum alloy in the aluminum-copper-magnesium series, which can be strengthened by heat treatment, its composition is reasonable, and its comprehensive performance is better. Aircraft skin aluminum alloy 2A12 has good spot welding weldability, and there is a tendency to form intergranular cracks when using gas welding and argon arc welding. 2A12 aluminum alloy has good machinability after cold work hardening. The corrosion resistance is not high, and anodizing treatment and painting methods are often used, or the surface is coated with aluminum cladding to improve the corrosion resistance.