Patent ID: 11912397
Assignee: EMBRAER S.A.
Field: Materials, metallurgy (Chemistry)
Classification: CPC B  C  F  Y | IPC B  C  F

Claim 14:
15. A method of fabricating a one-piece aircraft winglet spar having unitarily contiguous thermally configurable and non-thermally configurable regions, wherein the method comprises the steps of:
(a) providing a sinterable powder layer comprised of unitarily contiguous adjacent powder regions which respectively include shape memory alloy (SMA) particles and non-SMA particles,
(b) laser-sintering the sinterable powder layer to form a sintered powder layer which includes the unitarily contiguous thermally configurable and non-thermally configurable regions, respectively, and thereafter
(c) repeating steps (a) and (b) for a plurality of successively adjacent sintered powder layers to thereby form the one-piece winglet spar comprised of a thermally configurable region comprised of the SMA particles sintered according to step (b), and a non-thermally configurable region comprised of the non-SMA particles sintered according to step (b) which is unitarily contiguous with the thermally configurable region.