Touchstone Advanced Composites is collaborating with Northrop Grumman, an aerospace and defense technology company, to fabricate complex structural tooling for the next-generation YFQ-48A Talon Blue Collaborative Combat Aircraft.
Under the terms of the partnership, Touchstone will provide its CFOAM tooling material and fabricate certain parts for the aircraft while Northrop Grumman will develop Talon Blue as a modular, cost-effective and rapidly deployable autonomous wingman.
Touchstone Advanced Composites is part of Canonsburg-based Core Natural Resources’ Innovations business unit and previously played an integral part in Talon Blue’s successful autonomous taxi test in California.
“Our focus is on bridging the gap between prototype and full-rate production without compromising performance,” Dan Connell, president of Core’s Innovations business unit, said. “By providing a versatile material with tight control over thermal properties and material behavior, we’re able to support a faster, more adaptable engineering process as aircraft continue to evolve. CFOAM is a great example of how Core Natural Resources is creating new value propositions for coal, positioning it as a key material in next-generation applications across advanced manufacturing sectors such as aerospace and defense.”
Core’s Innovations Group produces next-generation coal applications and products. CFOAM technology is used to make the tools or molds for manufacturing composite aerospace parts.