Hexcel advances aerospace design innovation with first NCAMP qualification for honeycomb core material

Hexcel Corporation, a global leader in advanced composites, today announced the successful qualification of its HexWeb HRH-10 aerospace honeycomb through the National Centre for Advanced Materials Performance (NCAMP), administered by Wichita State University's National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR). The qualification establishes the aerospace industry's first NCAMP database for honeycomb core materials, providing engineers with design-ready material data intended to streamline structural design, reduce qualification costs and accelerate the adoption of advanced composite structures.

"As aerospace manufacturers work to bring increasingly advanced aircraft, launch vehicles and other aerospace platforms to market, access to trusted engineering data is becoming as important as access to the materials themselves," said Lyndon Smith, President, Americas & Global Fibers, Hexcel. "This qualification reflects Hexcel's commitment to making advanced composites more accessible and accelerating innovation across the aerospace ecosystem. By helping establish a common foundation for honeycomb core materials, we're enabling engineers to focus more time on designing the next generation of aerospace structures."

The qualification extends the proven NCAMP approach beyond composite prepreg systems and makes publicly available engineering data accessible for one of the industry's most widely used aerospace honeycomb materials. Hexcel's HRH-10 honeycomb was selected as the baseline material for the collaborative industry effort to establish a common qualification framework for honeycomb core materials.

The publicly available NCAMP database provides engineers with trusted material data and a common material specification that can be used to support structural design and development. By leveraging a shared qualification database, organisations can reduce the time, cost and effort associated with generating qualification data independently while gaining greater confidence in material selection and structural analysis. The qualification effort also generated additional engineering data to support the design of lightweight honeycomb structures across a range of aerospace applications.

"NCAMP exists to provide industry a trusted, consistent data foundation that accelerates certification and enables innovation," said John Tomblin, WSU Executive Vice President of Research and Industry and Defence Programmes and NIAR Executive Director. "Hexcel's HRH-10 honeycomb qualification expands that foundation into a critical class of materials for which engineers have long needed reliable, publicly available data."

As a vertically integrated supplier of advanced composites, Hexcel provides customers with a broad portfolio of aerospace materials, including carbon fibre, prepregs, honeycomb core and engineered composite structures. The HRH-10 qualification further strengthens the tools and resources available to engineers developing the next generation of lightweight, high-performance aerospace applications.

The HexWeb HRH-10 qualification database will be available through NCAMP resources published by NIAR.