Qantas airline composite delamination

Brief reference, attributed to "Brian" — apparently a prior class discussion. Used as the cautionary example for moisture-attacked adhesive. ## Figures referenced (numeric anchors, not cases)

We can have laminar composites. If we think of the Smile, the wood sculpture I showed you in the beginning, they've taken plywood to a new level. All these engineered wood products are basically composites of polymer and wood — adhesive and wood, where the wood is the cheaper material. If you look at those things I brought in, the adhesive in there is very thin because it's very expensive. The cheapest polymer adhesives are probably about two dollars a pound. You can get them for ten or twenty cents a pound — things like cornstarch — really cheap adhesives, but they also get attacked by moisture. If you want adhesives that won't be attacked by moisture, you'll find — in my welding lectures, when I talked about adhesives — typically you've got to get up to four to ten dollars a pound to get moisture-resistant adhesives. I'm talking about things that are going to be moisture-resistant for 10 or 20 years. You can get plenty of things that are good for three or four years, but not everybody likes their whole thing to delaminate, just like the Qantas airline reinforced composites. So they learned about the problem of adhesion.