Aerobloggen

It’s with mixed feelings I look out the window and see that it snows horizontally in Trollhättan right now, at least it’s not pitch black when you leave the office anymore… The past month rushed by with development week, recruitment of 2022 graduates and last week I had the opportunity to tag along my new department for a week of meetings at two of our US sites.

At the moment, I’m doing my third rotating at Supply Chain Engines, a global department who supports all Engines-sites across the globe, where I will work on further developing internal communications and knowledge sharing. As part of this project, I was invited to join the department for a gathering at our site in Newington to discuss Supply Chain and Procurement for three days.

The journey started in a turboprop plane to Copenhagen before boarding the A350-900 to Newark Liberty International Airport. The latter is propelled by the two Trent XWB engines where we manufacture the Intermediate Compressor Case at our site in Trollhättan.

Once in place, the meetings were held in Newington at our Engines site that manufactures large Fan cases to GE90 and IMC to the smaller of the GTF engines, 24k. The frist day we talked about the expectations of the team, targets and inventory management. One of the lesser expected learnings were that Americans serve their coffee in boxes and if you expect seven Swedes to be present, one of those boxes will not be enough to get through the day.

During day two, we talked about engagement, communications and knowledge sharing. Together with my current manager I conducted a workshop regarding how the department wants to communicate, what meetings that should be held continuously and how they can be more effective.

Last day was spent talking about new Aerospace standards and how they affect and ease our daily work before the afternoon was free to meet each other and discuss common issues before going home.

Before going home on Friday we visited our site in Manchester. It was great to see their workshop since it differs quite a lot from what we do in Trollhättan. In Manchester, they focus on manufacturing blades for the engines fan and compressor. For some programs, the process is quite similar to how we work in Trollhättan, a large forging that looks similar to the end product which is then processed to finished goods. However, they also produce really small compressor blades that is no more than 15cm long and is milled out of a block of aluminum. If you weren’t aware of the end product, you would have no clue what the raw material was supposed to become.

After the tour we headed back to Newark for the plane back home and the weekend. A short but intense trip to the US.

Interested in Aerospace? Right now we have a lot of interesting jobs on the GKN Aerospace career page, go have a look!

/Alex

Hello!

Last Friday, Emelie and I arranged a digital event for young girls and non-binaries between the ages of 13-19, with the goal of inspiring them to pursue a career in technology. The event is called IGE-day, Introduce a Girl to Engineering day, and is a concept created by the Womengineer Foundation. Womengineer has a vision that by 2030, the number of graduating engineers will be the same for both men and women. At GKN Aerospace, we work actively to increase the diversity of the company, and participating in events like these is very important to us. Because of this, we have participated in IGEday several years in a row.

As mentioned earlier, this year it was time for Emelie and I to arrange the event at GAS. Given the high spread of the Coronavirus at the beginning of the year, the event was decided to be held digitally, which went very well. We invited Johanna Nylander who presented the actions of the aviation industry to achieve a sustainable flight. Additionally, Elin Eriksson and Emily Chen told us about their journey and described what they do in a normal workday as engineers. Thank you for being a part of the event!

Because the event was digital, we chose to send out goodie bags to the participants, something that was very much appreciated. We hope that the participants had a good day and that they learned more about engineering, and possibly got an answer to the eternal question “What does an engineer do?”.

//Moa

Hello again all readers!

We are now back in Västra Götaland after an intense week in Bristol, UK. Finally, we had the opportunity to meet the other global graduates in real life and not behind a screen. What a fun week we had. A group of 16 people, 5 from the USA, 3 from the Netherlands, 3 from the UK and of course 5 from Sweden, stormed the streets of Bristol.

The days consisted of several training sessions that touched on various topics, including self-awareness, communication skills, change management, self-confidence and setting goals. This gave life to many exciting discussions. We also had the opportunity to visit the new GTC, which opened in October, as well as our site in Filton and Western Approach.

The afternoons and evenings were also packed with many fun activities. We visited Bristol’s famous Clifton Suspension Bridge. A beautiful view that was difficult to enjoy when your heart rate was at 120 bpm after a car ride in the hectic English left-hand traffic.

We were also Locked in a Room and had dinner on a boat.

To finish the week off, we were invited to the Recognition of Learning Event. At the event, the 2019 cohort graduated and other awards were handed out. This event took place at the Aerospace Museum in Bristol where we had dinner under the wings of the Concorde aircraft. An amazing experience.

Thank you to everyone who participated during the week and a big thank you to Charlie Lean who arranged it all. We now face the challenge of applying what we have learned and we look forward to the next Development Week.

Hi all,

I have during my latest rotation been at the same department as Emelie, but my task has been out of a different sort where I have focused on Additive Manufacturing (AM).

I have gotten the chance to meet many experts within the field of AM at the company and it has been really rewarding with interesting discussions. Well, discussion is maybe farfetched as I had to spend my full focus on taking notes as I am a rookie within the field of AM. But nevertheless I am really grateful for all the inputs and insights that I have received around the topic of additive manufacturing. I got a whole new view of it in a way that is not possible by reading a book.

Anyhow, some of you might wonder what additive manufacturing is, (pause for suspense) I will tell you. Ordinary manufacturing methods usually involves a subtractive method, which means that you have a big piece of metal that you turn and mill until it gets the form that you desire. Usually a lot of material is used up in the process (removed) which puts a high load on the environment, a load one preferably would eliminate! But nevertheless this method has been the traditional method to use as other options are scarce. This changed when additive manufacturing was introduced to the market, which is the opposite of subtractive manufacturing.

Additive manufacturing works by deposition of layer-by-layer until the desired part has been constructed, which you specify with the help of 3D-CAD. Today, you can perform the manufacturing of parts in some different ways and there exists seven different technologies to perform additive manufacturing. You can construct parts in plastic as well as in metal, however metal manufacturing is still energy intense which is unavoidable. In metal AM there are several different ways in which the material can be added to the manufacturing process, you can do it either with wire or powder. When using wire, you need to add the material locally to the build, where a laser is melting the tip of the wire. Using powder you get two options. You can add it locally just as in wire manufacturing, a nozzle deposits the material locally and a laser then melts the powder in place. You can also use a bed of powder where a laser, or another energy source, then sweeps the bed where the part is to be built and a component emerges towards the end. The part is then build “within” the bed itself. Whichever way you do it, some post-processing is required to achieve the desired finish.

Innovation and technology has always been the forefront at GKN Aerospace where we as a company always strive to attain knowledge and experience within different fields. This enables us to tailor-design a manufacturing process for our product portfolio. For example, we have a goal to construct our space components with the help of AM, which will usher our portfolio into the next generation. If you want to read more about our AM capabilities and goals, you can follow this LINK.

I started at the company as a graduate engineer in 2009, and later became an industrial Ph.D student who researched the company’s innovation capability. At that point, about ten years ago, it was mostly incremental innovation, small development steps that were made. One of the few radical innovations that I could find examples of in the industry was winglets. The winglets were something that even the passengers could see was slightly different, when the aircraft wings at the ends was bent upwards. Today, ten years later, we work with hydrogen engines, Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF), various types of additive manufacturing and more. Technologies that are radically changing the entire industry and its manufacturing. And the driving force in these innovational steps is not just money, but the ongoing climate crisis.

Suddenly, the whole industry has a sense of urgency! We have realized that if we want be in the business in the future, we must change to more sustainable flights. If we are to continue to attract young people to come and work with us, we must work in a different way. One might think that our industry has undeservedly been given the role as the “bad guy” in the climate crisis. Aviation today accounts for about 3% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, but with an increasing middle class in Asia who, like the western world, wants to travel, it is predicted that the small number will increase significantly in the future. So regardless of whether we are the “bad guys” today, we will be the “bad guys” in the future if we do not change.

It is now it’s happening. The creation of the radical innovations. That dramatic change in the industry that we will be able to remember and hopefully be proud of. It is now that the company needs everyone who cares about a sustainable world. It is not a matter of the sustainability work being done by a few people who have it written into their job description, but it needs to be done by everyone. Because even though the industry today places a great deal of focus on the climate, it must not be at the expense of other sustainability factors. How sustainable are we really if we achieve climate neutrality for our products during use, but at the same time risk the safety of our employees in manufacturing, buy materials from child labor in Congo, have a significantly larger proportion of material waste compared to the amount of materials delivered to customers, or ignore in that environmentally hazardous substances are released into the nature around our sites. A lot is being done, everything from technology projects on hydrogen propulsion, testing of how RM12 is affected by SAF, repair methods with Laser Metal Deposition Powder (LMD / DED), reduced buy-to-fly with LMD wire, weight reduction with Powder Bed Fusion, Life cycle analyzes, qualitative sustainability assessment tools, tools that evaluate material criticality, global Sustainability work streams, Sustainability Champions, the creation of educational materials, Connected Women, Environmental plans, and more and more. But we are also constantly finding new unexplored areas, more things that we need to do. Sustainability is complex, which is why the responsibility and work cannot be placed on a few people. It is now we are needed at the company, we who are passionate about a sustainable future! Do you want to be part of changing the direction of the industry?

// Johanna Nylander, Senior Research Engineer and Graduate Engineer 2009

Hello everyone!

With the spread of Covid-19 in Västra Götaland steadily increasing for the past few weeks, most of us at GAS have gone back to working from home after the Christmas break. Some people enjoy it, while others do not. It is easy to end up in a negative spiral when you have your office, gym and home behind the same door, and you easily forget the meaning of the word routine. With that said, we hope that we can be back in the office again soon and we have a very exciting spring (March) ahead of us, which makes it easier to keep our spirits up.

My second rotation, which started around Christmas, is in the Lean department. Elias told you briefly about the department in his previous blogpost, which was the department for his first rotation. However, the focus of our rotations have been very different. In my master’s, Quality and Operations Management, we had a course in Six Sigma that certified me as a Six Sigma Black Belt. Without going into too much detail, Six Sigma is about implementing improvement projects using different tools and there are different certification levels (White Belt, Yellow Belt, Green Belt, Black Belt and Master Black Belt). According to the global Lean Academy at GKNA, they now want to increase the proportion of certified Green Belts and Black Belts to improve GKNA’s way of working with systematic problem solving. My role in the department is to assist my supervisor in her project to become a certified Black Belt and thus Trollhättan’s Site Black Belt Representative, and to coach ongoing Green Belt projects. I will also have the opportunity to participate as a co-facilitator during the Lean Foundation trainings when the restrictions ease again, a training that will be held for all employees to increase their knowledge about Lean.

Take care.

/Moa

Hey!

After a much needed Christmas holiday, we are now well rested and excited for 2022, the year when everything hopefully changes for the better and we will not have to hear phrases such as “due to the current circumstances” and “new restrictions”.

Even though we officially started our second rotation a few weeks before Christmas, it has now finally started to gain some real momentum when everyone is returning from their holiday. My new department is rather diverse, and they work with everything from identifying new technologies to managing the company’s patents and mapping the effects our products have on the environment. My supervisor works a lot with the latter, and my assignment during the upcoming months consists of two parts. The first part is to create a life cycle assessment on one of our products. A life cycle assessment, or LCA, means that you investigate the life of a product, from raw material to recycling, which you can see in the picture below. This is something we want to create for all of our products here at GKN Aerospace in order to gain more knowledge and awareness about what effects our products have on the environment. I will model this LCA in a software called GaBi, so during these first few weeks of the rotation I have completed a tutorial to try to learn the program since it is completely new to me.

The second part of my assignment is to update a sustainability tool that is used at GKN Aerospace when designing and developing new products and technologies to make sure that the sustainability perspective is not forgotten. The aspect of the tool I am working with deals with materials and material choices. This is very important because we want to avoid materials that, for example, are conflict minerals or that will be difficult to have access to in the future, something this tool is trying to visualize. For this assignment, I have had to upgrade my Excel skills, and I have also tried some VBA (programming in Excel), which has been a lot of fun!

May 2022 be a great year!

/Emelie

Hello again everyone!

What wonderful winter weather we have had during the last weeks. Sadly, the snow is already melting and warmer degrees are anticipated. However, the Christmas feeling that the graduates have remains strong and we wanted to share it with our dear graduates from previous years. We therefore started off the week with a Christmas Mingle with mulled wine, gingerbread and good music out in the rain!

As the year comes to an end, a short break on the blog is also approaching. We will be back and updating again after the Christmas break. Several exciting posts are awaiting, so don’t forget to keep a lookout here on the blog.

The graduates of 2021 wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Take care and see you soon.

Hi everybody!

As my colleagues mentioned in their posts, we are currently on our first rotations of the graduate program. My first rotation is at our Lean department. My main focus during this rotation is our deployment of our Lean Operating Model (LOM), which will enable us to deliver operational excellence throughout our organization.

In addition to our daily duties at our rotations, we have several other responsibilities as trainees. Among other things, we are responsible for administrating the master theses that we have at GAS, conducting events for our trainee alumni group, writing posts for our trainee blog, attending career fairs and other events.

This weekend, my trainee colleagues and I partook in an event named First Lego League. First Lego League is an event where children between the ages of 10-16 are introduced to science, technology, engineering, and math through a hands-on project.  The objective of this project was to program a robot to maneuver a course and perform tasks along the course to obtain points.

 In addition to this, they proposed a new innovative idea to solve pollution associated with cargo transportation. During the event, we acted as rules officials and judges. We made sure that all the participants conformed to the rules and scored them based on how well they had performed their project, their technological solution, and their core values. It showed a lot of promise to see how well they performed, especially considering their relatively young age! These types of events are crucial for us as an aerospace company. Encouraging children to pursue their interest in STEM fields lays the foundation to create the next generation of engineers! To emphasize how important we think this is, the winning team was awarded a scholarship of 12000 SEK. Now, I’ll keep my fingers crossed that they manage to win the regional finals in Norway against our Nordic neighbors!

As Alex mentioned in his post, our next event together will be the digital career fair Armada. Being an ambassador for GKN Aerospace, attending these type of fairs are an important marketing activity that we perform. I, for one, am excited to have conversations with students nearing the end of their studies and convey what GKN Aerospace can offer them as a future employer! If you are a student at KTH and are interested in the aerospace industry, make sure to check out our virtual booth at Armada!

Till next time,

Elias