Wire Winding for Low Weight: A Description of the Technique Developed by Dowty‐Rotol Ltd. to Minimize Weight of Aircraft Components

WINDING high tensile steel wire on cylinders, or pressure vessels to increase their strength and resistance to internal stresses, is not a new principle. The Royal Ordnance Factories strengthened gun barrels in this way during the 1914–18 war, and in the years since the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, has experimented with pressure vessels (fig. 1). The application of two layers of wire is intended to give a ‘fail safe’ condition to damp down the effects of a burst cylinder.