I was recently flying on an A380 and from my window seat, I could see the vast expanse of the wing. It was HUGE – you could play badminton (or cricket for those who are familiar) on it.
And I just couldn’t fathom how it holds up with most of its length having no support. It’s carrying the weight of thousands of litres of fuel and two large engines, while being subjected to all the forces there would be while taking off, landing, and in-flight banking, turbulence, etc.
What is the engineering that causes them to not break?
In: Engineering
An a380’s maximum takeoff weight is 1.2 million pounds (545 thousand kilos). Sure, that’d be a heavy thing for you to carry around on your back, but compared to a non-airplane-object of similar size it is extremely light.
So, 1.2 million pounds. There are two wings, so each ~130′ wing carries 0.6 million pounds. 600,000lbs. Now that’s a lot of force, to be clear, but metal is absurdly strong. Treated 7075 aluminum has a tensile strength of 570 MPa. 82,700 psi. A single square inch of aluminum can survive 82,700 pounds of force pulling on it. You could hang the entire plane from a 4-inch aluminum cable.
The exact force required gets a little bit more complicated, since the wing acts as a lever, but the wings are something like a foot thick and several feet long. Not only is there plenty of room for the necessary aluminum – there’s so much room that the wing is largely hollow!
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