Today's KNOWLEDGE Share : DAHER just won a JEC Award for a thermoplastic wing rib.

Today's KNOWLEDGE Share

DAHER just won a JEC Award for a thermoplastic wing rib.

But not for the material - for the welding.

Daher’s JEC Award–winning thermoplastic wing rib is often described as an “aluminum replacement” case. However, if you look closely, the real replacement is not the material - it’s the joining philosophy.

The published numbers are clear:

– 22% weight reduction versus aluminum

– 15% lower assembly cost

– 25% shorter production cycle

– 64-ply thermoplastic laminate, ~12 mm thick

– AFP layup combined with Direct Stamping

– Infrared welding instead of mechanical fastening

Those results do not come from fiber efficiency alone.

In aluminum wing ribs, joints dominate the design. Rivets and bolts drive minimum thickness, local doublers, drilling tolerances, sealants, and inspection effort. A large fraction of structural mass exists purely to survive fastening. Infrared welding removes that entire stack of constraints.

A welded thermoplastic joint carries load through a continuous polymer–fiber interface, not through discrete fasteners. No holes means no local fiber cut-off and no fastener-driven thickness increase. This explains a large part of the 22% weight reduction at similar stiffness targets.

The cost numbers follow the same logic.

A riveted assembly requires drilling, deburring, fastening, sealing, and inspections. Welding collapses this into a single joining operation. Fewer operations mean fewer defect modes and less labor variability. That is where the 15% assembly cost reduction comes from.

Cycle time reduction is also structural.

Mechanical assembly scales poorly with fastener count. Welding time scales with joint length and heat transfer, which is far easier to automate. Combined with thermoplastic forming, this explains the reported 25% shorter production cycle.

Material choice matters here as well.

Using LMPAEK instead of PEEK lowers processing and welding temperatures, widens the process window, and improves repeatability. In production terms, that means higher yield and more stable automation.

This is the core point many miss.

Replacing aluminum with composites while keeping bolted joints preserves most of the old economics. Designing for welding from the start changes the load paths, the assembly flow, and the business case.

On a personal note: I’ve been following thermoplastic welding work at Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST), and I remember seeing very impressive welding results already back in 2019. They've been building deep expertise in this area for years. Congrats to Henri Perrin and the team on this well-deserved recognition!

This wing rib is not proof that composites are lighter than aluminum.

It is proof that welding turns thermoplastic composites into a production system, not a lab material.

source : Fedor Antonov