Windowless aircraft
I'm not sure what you mean by "spin", but you could lay fibre onto a former in the way they do for glass/carbon pressure vessels (used in chemical engineering). It's an expensive process as essentially each fibre is individually placed, and you'd need an autoclave large enough to take an entire fuselage to cure it off. But the main problem with this kind of structure is that you'd need to add subframe assemblies to mount things like wings, tails, engines, floors etc, and these don't integrate well with that kind of structure. Working out how to do doors, windows and access panels is a bit of a challenge as well.
The other option would be to use dry-woven tube (aka "sock") which could be laid over a former and tensioned to shape. I suppose you could also put it in a female mould and inflate a balloon inside it to create the shape, but that sounds like a very fiddley process to get right while the resin is curing. This is how carbon tent poles are made. The snag is that the actual fibre orientation is a function of the local curvature of the shape rather than being a specific angle determined to suit a stress requirement. You'd also have no fibres running axially down the tube, so it would be poor at taking bending stresses. Again, doing doors, windows, hatches amd mounting points would be a real challenge, so it would probably need longerons and some kind of hoop-frames to attach things to.
Carbon is a high-strength material, but only in tension. That means that you would end up making thin sections (because you don't need them any thicker to take the loads - that's where the weight-saving comes from), and these thin sections would need to have stringers or other supporting elements to give them the stiffness to take compression loads without buckling. So what you end up with is a complex structure - just as we do with metal, wood or any other material. I'm afraid there aren't any short cuts!
PDR
Incidentally - the difficulties of stressing the structure to take pressurisation loads is just one of the many sub-optimalities of the blended-wing concept which doesn't seem to get mentioned much.
PDR
PDR
many sub-optimalities of the blended-wing concept
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc...=rep1&type=pdf
http://www.dailypress.com/news/scien...212-story.html
There are lots of issues, but one of the major ones is that you can't get "family savings" for a suite of designs for different range/seats combinations. In the conventional layout it's quite easy to do variations (eg A318/319/320/321, or the plethora of 737 variants) optimised for different route/block patterns, but with the blended-wing concept pretty well the whole aeroplane has to be designed for a specific route and payload leading to niche aircraft with limited markets that won't service the investment requirements. This is similar to what happened to the A380, but more extreme. The concept only really seems to work with very large passenger loads, and as the A380 also showed there are only a limited number of uses for that kind of aeroplane.
Maintenance doesn't look straightforward - the engines are high-up and fully enclosed and would need fuel plumbing (presuming the fuel to be mainly in the outer wing panels) that somehow routes around the pax who are between the fuel and the engines. And I still don't see how they intend to make the pressure hull work without excessive structure weight or unacceptable stress concentrations.
And even that study report glosses over the evacuation issue by saying that they'd need to work with the FAA to produce some "new requirements". The lawyers would have a field day with that one if one ever caught fire or ditched...
PDR
Maintenance doesn't look straightforward - the engines are high-up and fully enclosed and would need fuel plumbing (presuming the fuel to be mainly in the outer wing panels) that somehow routes around the pax who are between the fuel and the engines. And I still don't see how they intend to make the pressure hull work without excessive structure weight or unacceptable stress concentrations.
And even that study report glosses over the evacuation issue by saying that they'd need to work with the FAA to produce some "new requirements". The lawyers would have a field day with that one if one ever caught fire or ditched...
PDR
"new requirements"
engines are high-up
PDR, the FAA (and EASA) routinely issue "Special Conditions" and Issue Papers during the development of a new aircraft. Special Conditions are typically used when new technology isn't adequately covered by the existing regulations. For example, when FADEC was first introduced, there were no meaningful regulations regarding Electromagnetic Interference (EMI), so there were special conditions for HIRF/Lightning resistance (it took another 20 years before the FAA actually finalized regulations for HIRF - so all the Boeing FADEC and FBW installations prior to the 787 were covered by Special Conditions. Issue papers are used similarly when meeting the letter of the regulation may not be 'adequate' and to make sure that the method of compliance used is acceptable. There is also the ever popular "Equivalent Safety Finding" - where the design may not meet the letter of the regulation but meets the safety intent of the regulation (Boeing thrust reverser installations post-Lauda have all used an EFS - the FAR says the aircraft must be controllable - that's not practical (maybe not even possible with big high bypass engines) so Boeing has instead designed the system so an in-flight deployment won't happen. Granting an ESF requires an Issue Paper on the subject.
This is all long standing SOP (due to all its advanced technology, the 787 had a huge number of Special Conditions, Issue Papers, and ESF). Boeing would be negotiating with the FAA and EASA on the requirements long before it formally launched any blended wing/body aircraft.
IMHO, if we see a blended wing aircraft, the first one(s) will be for the military - likely some sort of cargo aircraft.
This is all long standing SOP (due to all its advanced technology, the 787 had a huge number of Special Conditions, Issue Papers, and ESF). Boeing would be negotiating with the FAA and EASA on the requirements long before it formally launched any blended wing/body aircraft.
IMHO, if we see a blended wing aircraft, the first one(s) will be for the military - likely some sort of cargo aircraft.
