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Session: Session 5b: Advances in Manufacturing Automation
Session starts: Wednesday 15 April, 10:50
Presentation starts: 10:50
Room: Main

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Guus Roosken ()

Abstract:
With increasing rate demands in aviation, lower structural weight goals and rising labour costs, new manufacturing solutions are required to fulfil industry needs. For decades, GKN Fokker has been manufacturing primary thermoplastic aircraft structures (e.g. spars), hand lay-up and autoclave consolidation being the baseline manufacturing method. GKN Aerospace’s Global Technology Center Netherlands develops future-proof manufacturing technologies for high-rate production, with automation solutions implemented. Within the European funded Clean Sky 2 (CS2) program and the Dutch Aviation in Transition (LiT) project, Out-of-Autoclave manufacturing of high aspect ratio parts has been developed towards TRL6. Out-of-Autoclave manufacturing technology has been developed and validated on a flying application by selecting the CS2 LIFTT project tail front spar as technology demonstrator. The goals of the Out-of-Autoclave development were to reduce labour, and therefore production cost, increase part quality and prepare for high rate manufacturing for UAM applications and the Next-Gen Single Aisle (NGSA) aircraft. This presentation includes hardware and software automation solutions implemented in Out-of-Autoclave manufacturing of flying parts in a production environment representative for high-rate manufacturing of high aspect ratio parts. Also, an outlook is given on challenges and continuing developments for manufacturing of thermoplastic parts at high rate.