Fibre Metal Laminates: An Introduction

Fibre metal laminates were developed at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands, from the beginning of the 1980s. This is a new family of hybrid materials consisting of thin metal layers bonded together by fibres embedded in an adhesive. As a result of this build-up, fibre metal laminates possess a mixture of the characteristics of both metals and composite materials. Initial development led to the ‘Arall' variant using aramid fibres, which was first applied on the C-17 military t...