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February 2, 2004,
Vol. 74, No. 3S
Undergraduate Research Opportunity program gives student more than just research experience Andy Marshall
(BS’43 ME) still gets excited about honeycomb sandwich, a type
of composite construction he helped popularize after World War II that
made the building of large weight-critical aircraft more practical and
paved the way for a revolution in the aviation industry. “Now sandwich
is everywhere,” he says, noting that a low-tech version is used
in public bathroom stall partitions. “But in the early years, all
the customers were involved in aircraft.” Sandwich construction
consists of two thin facings rigidly attached to any light and inexpensive
core. The first honeycomb core, Chinese paper decorations dating back
2,000 years, was probably inspired by the hexagonally shaped nest chambers
wasps have been building for more than 25 million years. A pilot from the
age of 14, Marshall was drawn to honeycomb through his flying. Following
service in the U.S. Navy during the war, he worked from 1950 to 1978
for Hexcel Corporation. Started from a basement laboratory by his college
roommates, Roger Steele (BS’43 ME) and Roscoe Hughes (BS’43
ME), Hexcel today does $1 billion in business worldwide and remains
the industry leader. Marshall was Hexcel’s
western regional manager, with a region so large—everything west
of the Mississippi—that he had to buy his own plane to effectively
do the job. “Nominally
I was a salesman,” Marshall says, “but actually I was an engineering
missionary, teaching people who were already good engineers why honeycomb
was a logical answer to the problems faced in designing airframes. You
really couldn’t sell this stuff unless you taught people how to
apply it where it made sense.” He did so much
to facilitate the use of honeycomb sandwich that he was known at Hexcel
as “Sandwich Engineer” and industrywide as “Mr. Honeycomb.”
He refined manufacturing processes, championed potential applications,
and solved problems like identifying effective adhesives that could
resist damage from moisture and bacteria. First used in radomes (radar
equipment housing domes) and wings, then in airframe parts, honeycomb
was eventually incorporated throughout entire planes. “Major loads
are confined to a small part of the structure,” Marshall explains,
“so all those square feet aft of the spar [the main frame for a
plane’s wings] that don’t do much are candidates for honeycomb.”
Marshall was a
member of the Engineering Alumni Society for many years and served as
its president in 1971–72. He left Hexcel in 1978 to form his own
consulting firm, serving major airframe manufacturers including Boeing,
Bell, Lockheed, Douglas, and Martin. He recently wrote an entertaining
history of honeycomb for SAMPE, the Society for the Advancement of Material
and Process Engineering. The “tribute”
book, which includes a brief biography of Marshall, is available at
www.sampe.org/publicat.html. |
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