Assembly - February 2009 - (Page 64) Advertisement Advertisement CASE STUDY Composite Wing Assembly of the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Highly Accurate Gantry fter four years competition, Lockheed Martin’s Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) team won the U.S. Department of Defense contract to build the new F-35 JSF. The team is in the 10-year system development and demonstration phase to manufacture, develop and test the entire aircraft system. The program requires the team to build 22 test aircraft, fourteen for flight testing, seven for nonairborne test activities and one for radar signature evaluation. Deliveries are expected to begin in 2010. Lockheed Martin, the F-35 prime contractor who manufactures the forward fuselage, wings and performs final assembly awarded Sealant Equipment & Engineering the order to engineer and build a self-contained mobile metermix dispensing system for the F-35 wing assemblies. Sealant Equipment engineered and tested the reliable See-Flo® 494 positive rod displacement, meter-mix dispensing system for the team. The adhesive and assembly specifications require absolute metering ratio and mix quality precision for the $800 per gallon material to ensure no errors occur in the material metering and mixing process. Prior to attaching the carbon-fiber outer skin of the wing a Loctite Aerospace two-component moldable plastic shim epoxy paste adhesive is metered, mixed and applied on the metal wing structure. To do this an operator depresses a foot pedal to automatically meter and dispense precision mixed material to fill multiple 6 oz cartridges for the manual gun application. Once started, the operators have twenty minutes to completely apply the adhesive on the frame prior to attaching the carbon fiber outer skin. Sealant Equipment & Engineering, Inc. 45677 Helm St. PO Box 701460 Plymouth, MI 48170-0965 734-459-8600 Fax: 734-459-8686 Web: sealantequipment.com 64 ASSEMBLY / February 2009 www.assemblymag.com A A high-performance gantry motion system is playing a key role in the rising popularity of non-contact ultrasound testing, a revolutionary approach to nondestructive materials testing. SecondWave Systems, a division of Ultran Laboratories, Inc., State College, Pennsylvania, the company that pioneered this new approach to ultrasonic testing, has developed commercial systems that can fully characterize materials by moving the transducer across its length and width while measuring thickness, density, mechanical properties, defects, etc. A key to the success of this application is a highly accurate computerized numerical control (CNC) gantry from Techno Linear Motion Systems, New Hyde Park, New York, that positions the transducer to the high level of accuracy that is critical in so many applications. Non-contact ultrasound measuring technology has been successfully applied for the analysis of wide range of materials. This includes, aircraft/aerospace composites, space shuttle thermal protection tiles; green ceramics and powder metals; light metals; porous materials and foams; rubbers, tires, and plastics; wood, lumber, and construction materials; asphalt and re-enforced concretes; food and pharmaceutical products, level sensing and proximity analysis; bone density (osteoporosis) measurements, and several other materials and applications. Non-contact ultrasonic transmission and reflection signals are monitored in real time and are related to significant material characteristics, such as defects, texture, density, porosity, etc. Customers in the ceramics, paper, composites, and other industries are using it for automated, nondestructive testing that couldn’t be performed in any other way. Non-contact ultrasound is clearly the wave of the future for a wide range of inspection applications.” Techno Linear Motion Systems 2101 Jericho Turnpike New Hyde Park, NY 11040 Phone (800) 819-3366 Fax (516) 358-2576 http://www.sealantequipment.com http://www.assemblymag.com
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