JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #56 - April 2010 - 35

JEC INNOVATION AWARDS 2010
AUTOMATION
Winner: EADS Deutschland GmbH (Germany)
Partnership network: SGL Kuempers GmbH & Co. KG (Germany); Airbus Operations GmbH (Germany) Name: Automated preform production line for CFRP aircraft frames. Description: The transition from metal parts to CFRP is often labour intensive, and therefore expensive. The final product properties also depend on the manufacturer’s skills. Automation can bridge that gap for long-term profitable serial production. In co-operation with SGL Kuempers, EADS Innovation Works invented a process which allows producing high-quality, lowcost composite frames with high design flexibility and unmatched repeatability. Advantages or salient features: The main objective of the automated preform production line is to lower manufacturing costs by resorting less to manual operations and the primarily usage of raw roving material. This can lead to a final fly-to-buy ratio of almost 95%. Key benefits: - high automation and repeatability; - the combination of a competitive philosophy and the grasp for turning a research technology into series products will help to establish this kind of highly automated technology for future production lines; - high fly-to-buy ratio: up to 95% of the raw roving material can be used; - high material performance due to the UD braiding process; - material mixtures of raw roving material, toughening and resin systems. State of development: The project was launched in January 2008 and was successfully completed by the end of 2009. The machinery is located in the Technology Centre in Stade. The process line was especially designed for the highly automated production of aircraft Airbus frames and can meet the requirements of future aircraft types, e.g. A30X. The target of approximately 30-40 aircrafts (A30X) per month can be achieved. The design of aircraft frames can vary within a wide range of shapes to meet fuselage structure requirements. The machine is capable of producing frames with alternating cross sections and curvatures. To lower the costs of forthcoming CFRP production and to be able to compete with metallic structures, it is mandatory that material suppliers, machine manufacturers and end users work closely together. The project has demonstrated this in a remarkable way. Therefore, a high market potential is expected for automated CFRP production. More information: www.eads.net

Winner: Magestic Systems Inc. (USA)
Partnership network: Lockheed Martin (USA); Nikon Metrology (Belgium) Name: Cured Laminate Compensation (CLC) process – an innovative composite manufacturing solution for saving composite material and increasing production throughput. The CLC process harnesses the vast capabilities of both Nikon Metrology’s Laser Radar technology and MSI’s TruPLY Compensation (TPC™). Description: The CLC process is not limited to aerostructures. Wind turbine blades, super yachts and automobiles are all beginning to incorporate composite materials into their construction and could use the CLC process to achieve the same savings and quality. Because the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is a high-performance aircraft, where weight and geometric tolerances are critical, Lockheed Martin needed to address the inherent +/- 8% thickness variation that occurs when manufacturing composite wing skins. Furthermore, Lockheed Martin sought to develop a new process to replace the traditional method of

using high-cost, high-precision milling machines to remove sacrificial plies added to keep wing skins within thickness tolerances. By combining Laser Radar and PCS™ technologies, Lockheed Martin set up an automated production process that is designed to produce parts of predictable quality, while rigorously reducing scrap and maintaining accuracy, scalability and ease of use. The synergy between Magestic Systems’ TPC™ and Nikon Metrology’s Laser Radar offered Lockheed Martin a seamless solution to control critical thickness zones of the cured laminate composites used in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter – utilizing metrology, automatic ply nesting and laser projection technologies to produce composite parts within engineering thickness tolerances. Within a range of 60m, the contactless Laser Radar system from Nikon Metrology captures the surface geometry of composite parts of any shape and size, without requiring SMR or other targets. Magestic Systems developed TruPLY Compensation™ (TPC) to compare the “as-built” data collected by Nikon

No56 April 2010 / jec composites magazine

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JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #56 - April 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #56 - April 2010