Structural box beams.

摘要

A structural box beam of the type formed by a method using superplastic forming and diffusion bonding techniques (SPF/DB). The basis is a SPF/DB four sheet cellular structure box beam (33), for particular application to a flap track beam (13) for aircraft, said box beam including integrally formed flap track flanges (34) and corrugated shear webs (35). The corrugations serve the dual purpose of reacting local track bending moments. Internal shear webs (36) are integrally formed as part of the cellular structure. The box beam is designed to be manufactured from a flat blank assembly (39) consisting of four chemically-etched sheets (40-43) with local reinforcements placed between the core and skin sheets providing a low cost means of tailoring the beam to minimum thickness requirements.