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This essential information captures the state of the composites industry to assist engineering/technical professionals in charting a course for achieving economic success. The material characteristics of composites, their applications, and complex composites manufacturing processes depend on many factors. These are all fully considered and presented to meet the challenges that face this marketplace.

Automated Tape Laying (ATL) is one of the original automated processing methods developed for composite aircraft structure. Development of the ATL process started in the late 1960’s and the first commercial machines were available by the late 1970’s. Tape layers were used primarily on military aircraft programs during the 1980’s as composite materials had not yet been used extensively for commercial aircraft primary structure. As composite material usage on commercial aircraft primary structure has increased in the last few years, ATL has re-emerged as a widely used process in the aircraft industry. ATL systems have excellent material lay up rates and companies who use these machines have discovered a variety of ways to take advantage of that capability. Tape layers can be used for a variety of aircraft parts. For example, on some current generation aircraft, all assembly components that make up the horizontal stabilizer box are made with the ATL process.