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Text: James Woodcock
A polymer latch inside the roller shutter assemblies of Airbus A330, A340 and A380 aircraft kept failing. It holds the roller brake and endcap, and was not strong enough for the wear it met in service. Original equipment manufacturers would not sell it separately, so every failure meant replacing the complete assembly.
Lufthansa Technik's additive manufacturing team redesigned it for metal 3D printing in titanium Ti6Al4V. "The original part was an injection-molded polymer component with a complex geometry," said project engineer David Rudolz, who saw it at once as a metal AM candidate.
Carrying the same function into a new material made elastic response, geometry and wall thickness the governing factors. The team treated the work as an optimization exercise, improving the part where it could.
Lufthansa Technik's EASA Part 21.G and 21.J approvals let it design, manufacture and certify flight-ready parts in-house. It chose Materialise for production, citing its Bremen Metal Competence Center and EN 9100 certification for metal. Materialise passed the required audit, qualified as a supplier, then worked with Lufthansa Technik engineers on process stability and production controls.
The latches are certified and flying. Expected service life is considerably longer and a targeted repair now swaps the latch rather than the whole roller shutter unit. Materialise has since been named an official ‘workbench’ for metal parts.
