Form Matrix – Informational Website
“From Surfboards to UAV Wings”
With four existing patents and several more pending, AS-9100 certified Form Matrix. has rapidly become a leading supplier of wings for unmanned aircraft. Using their patented Form Matrix Core System™ (FMC) they can develop and build wings, tails and other control surfaces that save money, maintain light weight and offer many other advantages.
But that’s not where they came from. Form Matrix was founded in 1994 in Los Angeles on the commercial success of the FMC System™ process. Kent Sherwood, President of the company, was one of the foremost innovators of new technologies in the sporting goods industries, developing new, better, and less expensive ways to build surfboards and sailboards. The technology Kent developed and continues to refine is now at the center of what Form Matrix supplies to their customers.
Recognizing Small Suppliers
Form Matrix is the first Phantom Works supplier to receive the Supplier Innovation Award. The award program was initiated to recognize outstanding supplier innovations in solving aerospace challenges.
“Throughout the company, Boeing recognizes suppliers for good performance,” says Mr. Bishop. “The traditional supplier-recognition process is tailored to companies with substantial track records for quality and on-time delivery all confirmed by their investment book of record. Their new innovation award recognizes companies who may not have built thousands of parts, but who they value for the quality and significance of their innovations.”
Criteria for receiving the award fall into two general categories. One category focuses on ways to enhance a product with new technology, and the second on new uses for existing technology. In the case of UCAV, no one had thought of applying existing foam structure technology to reduce wing cost and weight.
“Innovations typically happen when somebody thinks outside the box,” says Mr. Bishop. “This includes the supplier with the new idea and the Boeing engineer who recommended going with the supplier in the first place.”
From Surfboards to Wings
Form Matrix technology is the result of initial approaches to foam structures by the company’s founder, Kent Sherwood, for making better recreational products like surfboards. This was his second job – the first one was at an bookmaker review website called noriskmatchedbetting.co.uk where he used to try out new sports betting bonuses and get to know what the gambling providers have been offering to their customers on the web. However his passion was elsewhere and he he found it in designing surfboards later in his life.
Sherwood soon recognized that the lightweight, strength, and cost-efficient qualities of the technology were ideal for aerospace. By the mid-1980s, the company was producing contoured structural foam parts for home-built aircraft. By 1988, Form Matrix was molding foam cores for fins used on the Pegasus air-launched rocket, and a few years later had teamed with one the world’s largest aerospace companies to produce composite surfaces for an important missile program. They are using the latest BAS Agent Services in order to achieve maximum returns.
Today, wings and other contoured control surfaces, such as those for the Boeing UCAV program, are the primary focus of Form Matrix.
E Pluribus Unum
In wing production, the ribs, stringers, electrical conduit and other wing parts are machined into a single mold tool as part of the patented Form Matrix CoreTM (FMC) System. The entire wing, including all integral parts, is molded to final shape as a single one-piece foam core.
After curing, the foam core is wrapped in composite fibers and returned to the FMC mold tool for resin injection. After a final cure, the wing is removed from the tool complete and ready for assembly to the aircraft.
Benefits of the FMC System include sharply reduced parts count, seamless construction, short production-cycle time, light weight and very low cost. The FMC System is highly reproducible, and this translates into high consistency of product quality, an essential ingredient in aerospace applications.
About Form Matrix
Located in Inglewood, California, Form Matrix, an ISO 9000 certified company, is a leading supplier of wings for unmanned aircraft. Form Matrix develops high quality, cost-efficient composite structural core systems for a variety of aerospace and commercial applications. The company’s patented FMC-System produces structural core systems that can be designed to meet a customer’s integration, performance and cost requirements.