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Airbus Operations – Door Seal Interface: How to design a One-Piece-Striker?

Description of the company

Airbus is a global leader in aeronautics, space and related services. It offers the most comprehensive range of passenger airliners from 100 to more than 600 seats. Airbus is also a European leader providing tanker, combat, transport and mission aircraft, as well as Europe’s number one space enterprise and the world’s second largest space business. In helicopters, Airbus provides the most efficient civil and military rotorcraft solutions worldwide.

Situation

The Interface of today’s AIRBUS passenger doors and cargo doors linked to the fuselage is designed with different design solutions. The horizontal interface design will be realized by a classical aluminum striker-design. This Interface design is common design solution for commercial aircrafts around the globe. The industrial standard is a multi-piece design in regards to the striker components. All striker components will be mounted onto the fuselage and define the contact area to the door seal. The striker pieces are designed to have a gap between each other. This is required because of tolerances and material differences between striker and fuselage. Different material properties have to be considered in the design.

Problem

The today’s interface is critical because of high rates of noise issues driven by the multi piece striker design. The interface is very sensitive. Small interruptions into the sealing line having a direct impact onto noise. Due to the multi piece design the sealing line has interruptions between the striker components. These gaps are closed by sealant (flexible sealing glue). But it is very difficult to realize a flush lining between striker-sealant-striker. Today it is required to realize the tolerance field by a maximum deviation about 0.1mm. For a manual application process it’s very difficult. In addition the operating time to assemble the striker components is very high and needs to be reduced.

Aims of the project

Project target is the investigation into new ideas and possibilities how to design the next generation of door striker. The vertical and horizontal door interfaces are in scope and have to be analyzed in regards to the possibility to change the todays design into a one-piece striker design. During this investigation different materials shall be considered. The current aluminum striker profile could be substituted by a synthetic material (plastic).

Scopes