MC-21 fuselage delivered to TsAGI for endurance testing
12 December 2018
In the beginning of December, the MC-21-300 fuselage was delivered to the Zhukovsky Central AeroHydrodynamic Institute (TsAGI, a member of the National Research Center “Zhukovsky Institute.”) The unit will be used for endurance testing. The research is carried out by the request of PJSC “Irkut.”
TsAGI specialists together with members of the Irkut Corporation will hold final assembly of the fuselage section and make pressure tests.
Then the Institute’s specialists will have airframe fatigue tests on endurance and survivability. The section will be installed on the test bench, which will simulate the load at all flight stages and record numerous parameters that characterize the behavior of the fuselage module and its elements.
The endurance tests are hold to confirm the design solutions in terms of endurance strength and damage tolerance.
During the tests the airframe will be repeatedly loaded, imitating not less than 180 thousand flights. The experiments will last for about three years.
The MC-21-300 is a new generation aircraft with a capacity of 163 to 211 passengers and targets the largest segment of the aviation market. The aircraft provides passengers with a significant new level of comfort, due to the largest fuselage diameter in narrow-body aircraft. The aircraft is superior to existing counterparts in terms of flight-technical characteristics and efficiency. The major contributor to the enhancement of flight-technical characteristics of the aircraft is the wing made of polymer composite materials, a first-in-the-world, developed for narrow-body aircraft with a capacity of over 130 passengers. The use of composites in the MC-21 design exceeds 30% and is unique for this category of aircraft.