JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #130 - September/October 2019 - 14

NEWS aeronautics

Northrop Grumman in Clearfield, Utah: the state
of the art in aerospace-structure manufacturing
Composites, Northrop Grumman and Utah, a winning trio! These three
elements do very well together. They don't just complement each other
- they enhance each other. In Utah, the aerospace sector has found a
unique location to have its high-value-added structural parts manufactured using innovative processes and well-trained personnel.

n June 2018, Northrop
Grumman Corporation announced that it had completed the acquisition of Orbital
ATK Inc., a global leader in aerospace and defence technologies.
Orbital ATK is now Northrop
Grumman Innovation Systems,
a new, fourth business sector. On that occasion, then
Northrop Grumman Chairman
and CEO Wes Bush said: "We
are very excited about the value creation our combination represents for our customers, shareholders and employees. Together,
through our leading technologies and innovation-focused culture, we look forward to developing enhanced mission capabilities
and more competitive offerings in
critical global security domains".

Orbital ATK's expertise was
well established and the activities of the two groups were very
complementary, with the potential to create strong synergies.
In September 2017, Northrop
Grumman announced the definitive merger agreement with
Orbital ATK, under which
Northrop Grumman would acquire Orbital ATK for approximately $7.8 billion in cash, plus
the assumption of $1.4 billion in
net debt.
On board with
the A350 program
As part of what has become a
leading global security company with a workforce of 85,000
in 25 different countries, the
Clearfield, Utah site has maintained its status as a key element in the group's industrial
structure. Formerly Orbital

ATK Inc., this production site
is the one most concerned by an
agreement reached with Airbus
in July 2015. The agreement expands the current contract to include the manufacture of composite stringers and frames for
the A350 program's -1000 variant, adding to the work already
being performed on that program. The Aerospace Structures
Business Unit of Northrop
Grumman's Flight Systems division is executing the A350
program at its state-of-the-art
Aircraft Commercial Centre of
Excellence facility in Clearfield,
Utah. At the time of the announcement, the company
was already producing composite stringers and frames for the
A350-900 and had successfully delivered more than 44,000
parts since the inception of
the program. Today, Northrop

With over 85,000 employees and an annual revenue in excess of $30 billion,
Northrop Grumman is one of the world's largest weapons manufacturers and military technology providers

jec composites magazine / N°130 September - October 2019

Grumman has delivered over
250,000 A350-900 parts to
Airbus.
Stringers and frames
The group leads the industry in
high-quality, automated composite manufacturing. Northrop
Grumman's patented automated stiffener forming (ASF)
process is a technology built
for commercial aircraft. ASF
provides higher quality stiffeners at lower cost and with superior compaction and repeatability compared to those
produced using the previous
industry-standard, hand layup
process. Developed in 2007,
the Northrop Grumman ASFM
technology is also unique for its
design flexibility.
Providing both a linear and radial option, the ASF machine
(ASFM) can fabricate the stringers and frames that make up
the skeleton of a commercial aircraft fuselage shell at production
rates of nearly 10 times that of
the traditional lay-up process.
The success of the Clearfield site
is linked to the group's capacity
to innovate and propose highly
productive innovative processes, although if the regional
ecosystem and human resources
hadn't also been in place, such
a capacity would probably not
have sufficed. The site also pro-

JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #130 - September/October 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #130 - September/October 2019