Monocoque (pronounced mon-uh-kohk or mon-oh-kok (non-U))
(1) A type of boat, aircraft, or rocket construction in which the shell carries most of the stresses.
(2) A type of automotive construction in which the body is combined with the chassis as a single unit.
(3) A unit of this type.
1911: An English borrowing from the French monocoque, the construct being mono + coque. Mono is from the Ancient Greek μόνος (monos) (alone, only, sole, single), from the primitive Indo-European root men (small, isolated). Coque is from the Old French coque (shell) and concha (conch, shell), from the Latin coccum (berry) and concha (conch, shell) from the Ancient Greek kokkos (berry, seed). In the early twentieth century, it was the French who were most dominant in the development of aviation. Words like monocoque, aileron, fuselage and empennage are of French origin and endure in English because it’s a vacuum-cleaner of a language which sucks in anything from anywhere which is handy and manageable.
Noted monocoques
Deperdussin Monocoque, 1912.
A monocoque (sometime referred to as structural skin) is a
form of structural engineering where loads and stresses are distributed through
an object's external skin rather than a frame; concept is most analogous with
an egg shell. Early airplanes were built using wood or steel tubes covered with
starched fabric, the fabric rendering contributing only a small part to
rigidity. A monocoque construction
integrates skin and frame into a single load-bearing shell, reducing weight and
adding strength. Although examples flew
as early as 1911, airframes built as aluminium-alloy monocoques would not become
common until the mid 1930s. In a pure
design where only function matters, almost anything can be made a stressed
component, even engine blocks and windscreens.
Lotus 25, 1962.
In automotive design, the word monocoque is often misused, treated
as a descriptor for anything built without a separate chassis. In fact, most road vehicles, apart from a
handful of expensive exotics, are built either with a separate chassis (trucks
and some SUVs) or are of unibody/unitary construction where box sections, bulkheads
and tubes to provide most of the structural integrity, the outer-skin adding
little or no strength or stiffness. Monocoque
construction was first seen in Formula one in 1962, rendered always in
aluminium alloys until 1981 when McLaren adopted carbon-fibre. A year later, the McLaren F1 followed the
same principles, becoming the first road car built as a carbon-fibre monocoque.
BRM P83 (H16), 1966.
In 1966, there was nothing revolutionary about the BRM P83’s monocoque
chassis. Four years earlier, in the
second season of the voiturette era, that revolution had been triggered by the Lotus
25, built with the first fully stressed monocoque chassis, an epoch still unfolding
as materials engineering evolves; the carbon-fibre monocoques seen first in the
1981 McLaren MP4/1 becoming soon ubiquitous.
The P83 used a monocoque made from riveted Duralumin (the word a portmanteau
of durable and aluminium), an orthodox construction for the time. Its novelty was that the engine was a
stressed part of the monocoque.
BRM Type 15 (V16), 1949.
The innovation was born of necessity. Not discouraged by the glorious failure of
the extraordinary V16 BRM had built, with much fanfare and little success, shortly
after the war, the decision was taken again to join together two V8s in one
sixteen cylinder unit. Whereas in 1949,
the V8s had been coupled at the centre to create a V16, for 1966, the engines
were re-cast as 180o flat 8s with one mounted atop another in an H
configuration, a two-crankshaft arrangement not seen since the big Napier-Sabre
H24 aero-engines used in the last days of the war. The design yielded the advantage that it was
short, affording designers some flexibility in lineal placement, but little
else. It was heavy and tall,
exacerbating further the high centre of gravity already created by the need to
raise the engine location so the lower exhaust systems would clear the ground. Just as significantly, it was wide, too wide
to fit into a monocoque socket and thus was taken the decision to make the
engine an integral, load-bearing element of the chassis. There was no other choice.
BRM H16 engine and gearbox, 1966.
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