Innovation: Overbraided Single-Piece Serpentine Duct with Melt-out Core
Award Category: Combined Strength, 2025 CAMX finalist
Company: NIAR/WSU with partners: A&P Technology and Fiber Dynamics
Objective: Overbraided (braiding over a tool) single-piece aircraft serpentine duct manufactured over a melt-out tooling material.
Results: The part is then infused with resin and cured. Finally, the tooling material is melted out by increasing the temperature after curing and recycled. The duct is approximately 2.3 meters (7.5 feet) long with perimeters ranging from 1.4 to 2.5 meters at the engine side and inlet, respectively.
Impact: Braided composites fundamentally transform the structural and manufacturing paradigm for aerospace ducts by providing intrinsic through-thickness reinforcement that dramatically improves interlaminar strength and reduces delamination risk, enabling damage-tolerant, certifiable structures that maintain integrity under impact, fatigue, and vibration without excessive safety margins. Triaxial braiding allows precise tailoring of stiffness, strength, and load paths for highly efficient, locally optimized designs, while the automated overbraiding process eliminates defects common in hand layup or automated fiber placement, improving material yield, accuracy, and repeatability. This automation-ready approach reduces labor and scrap, supports high-rate production, and delivers the traceable quality demanded in aerospace—ultimately creating a lighter, stronger, and more scalable solution than metals or traditional laminates.
From the Expert: ” The goal was to validate an integrated process chain that reduces tooling cost and lead time while enabling sustainable, high-rate composite production.” ~Waruna Seneviratne, Director of ATLAS (Advanced Technologies Lab for Aerospace Systems) at NIAR