this episode of real engineering is brought to you by the curiosity stream a nebula bundle deal sign up now to watch the hour-long version of this video linked in the description if you were not paying attention you may not have noticed the revolution happening in the airline industry the days of attempting to build bigger and bigger airliners like the NUMBER_TOKEN passenger double decker aNUMBER_TOKEN and the NUMBER_TOKEN passenger humped NUMBER_TOKEN are gone the behemoths are simply being out-competed by a new generation of planes many mourn the slow demise of these iconic planes but you are benefiting from this change the entire nature of air travel has changed to benefit you and your needs your local airport has more direct flights to distant lands than ever before and the price of those tickets are cheaper than ever connecting flights are becoming rarer and rarer as this new breed of plane takes over the plane at the forefront of this revolution the NUMBER_TOKEN dreamliner a NUMBER_TOKEN billion dollar bet on the future of the airline industry boeing sat at the poker table and pushed all their chips forward and all in bet on a radical new future and it paid off the NUMBER_TOKEN revolutionized not only how the airline industry operates but how the future of planes will be designed and built this is the breakdown of the NUMBER_TOKENs materials by weight NUMBER_TOKEN of the NUMBER_TOKEN is made from composite materials like carbon fiber reinforced plastics making it the first commercial airliner made primarily with this new age material the NUMBER_TOKEN is rivaled only by the airbus aNUMBER_TOKEN xwb introduced four years after the NUMBER_TOKEN in NUMBER_TOKEN. so why are composite materials so desirable for the airline industry and how has the NUMBER_TOKEN made the most of their advantages composite materials are made up of two or more materials take carbon reinforced plastics they are composed of extremely strong carbon fibers bound together by a plastic resin carbon fiber made up of thousands of tiny thin fibers of carbon is incredibly strong in tension up to five times stronger than steel and one-fifth of its weight but these tiny fibers can't create a solid part by themselves this is an image of a human hair beside a carbon fiber the carbon fiber is the smaller one and just like a human hair they can bend and flex and separate very easily so we need to first bind them together with a plastic resin to form a solid material otherwise they just form a strong but flexible fabric that flexibility as a fabric is exactly what makes composites so useful when creating the precise and elegant curves of a plane with the right tooling and designers composite components can be made into almost any shape imaginable in the past a disadvantage of making large aircraft components from composites was the time taken to manually lay up parts where layers of carbon fiber and plastic resin had to be carefully constructed it required skilled technicians and was inherently difficult to scale to the production quantities boeing needed to get around this boeing uses automated tape laying to produce massive aircraft sections the NUMBER_TOKENs fuselage is created by wrapping a carbon fiber tape impregnated with a plastic resin around a rotating mold of the fuselage this machine precisely controls the overlaps of the tape and the orientation of the fibers to ensure we are getting the most out of the carbon's tensile strength to resist the internal pressure loads and the longitudinal bending loads the fuselage will experience one of the problems with this manufacturing method is that the part needs to be placed inside an oven to cure the resin this hardens the plastic and creates a solid composite structure ovens the
START_SPONSOR_TOKEN this episode of real engineering is brought to you by the curiosity stream a nebula bundle deal sign up now to watch the hour-long version of this video linked in the description END_SPONSOR_TOKEN