JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #138 - January/February 2021 - 26

MANUFACTURlNG automation

Airborne Automated Kitting solution as customized for Magellan

up contacting Airborne with the idea to
flesh out this whole process. We put together a specification and worked with
three different companies to identify the
best solution, develop a good working
relationship with, that would provide
the best value. We ultimately settled on
Airborne to provide the equipment and
our journey together began.
How did the customization process go?

A.v.M.: One of the key things was
that, of course it must be an integrated
machine, but has to handle very complex plies. The customization has more
to do with the way we handle those
plies. In the past, we have seen that if
you do large numbers, mostly bigger
plies that have generic shapes, it is easy
to predict how to pick them up. But in
our case, it is more complex. That is
the customization that we have done,
and we also added some other features
to improve the productivity. To us, this
customization was very wide, that is
why it was very interesting for us to do
this project.
We see the features that Magellan is asking for, features that are building blocks

26

that in the industry other companies
will be looking for.

Mattia Di Francesco: Maybe

just one thing to add, we are delivering
the machine to serve Magel-lan's needs
for today's programme with Lockheed.
But the machine will most likely outlive
the programme, and will be used for
other parallel activities in the future. To
facilitate that, we for example added a
manual ply feeder that will enable Magellan to feed in plies that are cut on a
separate cutter. We wanted to make sure
that we provide a piece of equipment
that delivers the re-sults not only on the
short term for this programme, but also
in the long term.

J.P.: One of the main requirements we
established when we were looking for
a solution was a package solution - a
one-stop-shop. We did not want to buy
a cutter from a company, a sequencer
from another company and perhaps
get into an issue where everything is
not working as well as we imagined. We
really wanted to go down the path of a
one-stop shop, a company that would

	 jec composites magazine / N°138 January - February 2021

commit to us and provide the services
that we need and keep the machine running through its lifetime, whether it's
the cutter or the sequencer or the robot.
And that's the commitment Airborne
made to us.
That is important to us as a production
facility, the operations workers on the
floor need the machine running, and
it is very helpful to have one company
dealing with the maintenance of the entire system. It was key to find somebody
who can take that responsibility.
How did the collaboration go? Did
Airborne send a team over at Magellan?

J.P.: There has been a lot of energy put
into this project from both sides. The
collaboration has been wonderful and
I expect it to continue going forward.
Airborne came here, and then we went
to Airborne for the demonstration day.
We spent some time together to meet
each other formally and we continue
to do that. We meet weekly, two teams
(a technical team and an administrative
team) to make sure that we are on the
same page throughout the project. This
is a first for Airborne and for us, they are
JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #138 - January/February 2021

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