Composites, Urethane & Rubber Products

When you need an expert in the design, manufacture and testing of large, complex composite structures for your naval fleet, look to Collins Aerospace. For more than half a century we’ve been providing this expertise to customers worldwide.

Composites

Complexity is our specialty. Past projects have included large composite structures weighing more than 50 tons and measuring more than 40 feet long. We’ve designed and manufactured numerous large, complex and advanced composite structures for the U.S. and Canadian navies, including submarine bow domes, surface ship sonar domes, composite sonar keel domes and submarine high-frequency acoustic windows.

Fabrication of a large composite structure requires expertise in handling and movement. Our facility, initially designed for the construction of 20,000-pound surface combatant sonar dome rubber windows, includes a temperature- and humidity-controlled high bay fabrication building with heavy-duty overhead cranes. Our location near the Intracoastal Waterway and St. John’s River in Jacksonville, Florida, is ideally suited for shipping large composite structures.

Composite structures from Collins Aerospace are designed to be low maintenance and lightweight. They can help reduce your total ownership costs through their inherent corrosion resistance and their higher fuel efficiencies of using lower weight materials.

Capabilities include:

• Pre-impregnated and resin-infused composite material systems designed and qualified for use on submarines (e.g., carbon, fiberglass)
• Either solid laminate or foam-filled core
• Large and thick, with complex curvatures

High toughness materials with low void contents designed for submerged environments

Urethanes

Military and industrial customers have counted on Collins Aerospace for acoustic and energy-absorbing elastomeric materials. Our energy management materials have been successfully used in underwater acoustic applications for submarines and surface ships, and in vibration isolation applications.

Let us custom formulate hydrolytically stable underwater acoustic materials to meet your specific performance requirements. These can be optimized for energy absorption or acoustic transparency over a broad frequency range.

Our family of castable elastomeric materials provides virtual transparency to sound in water. Using acoustically transparent materials, we can encapsulate sensors in a tough protective coating as part of an acoustic composite structure or by itself as an acoustic window. To meet your application requirements, we can vary material properties such as operation frequency, bulk modulus, sound speed and insertion loss.

We can also add a variety of fillers to our formulations to further optimize performance characteristics.

Rubber Products

Collins Aerospace rubber and composite/rubber hybrid products have been supporting the U.S. Navy’s anti-submarine warfare (ASW) and submarine acoustic needs for over 60 years.

We have been providing high-performance rubber products and bonded rubber components to U.S. and foreign navies for decades. Products include acoustic sonar windows, acoustic baffles and reflectors for use in sonar systems.

Other products include:

• Submarine bow dome boots – an autoclave-cured thick rubber boot nearly 30 feet in diameter and weighing over 20,000 pounds. Built to exacting tolerances.
• Acoustic tiles – our Goodrich products include acoustic tile types that can meet a variety of needs for underwater sound applications.
• Wire reinforced sonar domes – our rubber bow domes and keel domes have been used by navy surface ships around the world for anti-submarine warfare.

Composite/Rubber Products

RHO-COR® sonar domes – RHO-COR is our patented technology combining structural composites with an elastomeric acoustic core resulting in a high-performance acoustic window.