Aerobloggen

Now that our activity week, when we were out in Europe, has passed and the new year has begun it is time for most of us to make our first rotation and start at a new department. This only applies to the five of us that belong to the local program, and not Malin and David who belong to the global program. They will stay at the same department until they leave for their first assignment abroad.

I have been with the manufacturing engineers working with space and military during my first rotation (10 weeks). It has been lots of fun to be that close to production and I have seen and done quite a lot during this time. I have been a part of a development project developing the future generations of space nozzles and I have seen what the daily work with the production is like. I have made so-called JTDs. JTD is short for Job Training Document and is a kind of work instruction that can be used as a compliment for regular drawings and work instructions. A JTD has a lot of pictures and explicit explanations to facilitate for someone who has never performed these operations before. One of the JTDs I have made covers a welding operation and as I had no previous experience of welding, I found it very interesting!

My new department, where I started straight after coming home from our activity week, is with the design engineers. They are ones who makes the drawings and places requirements on products. They are also in contact with both the customer and people from production to make sure the things they do are aligned with the customer needs as well as possible to produce. It is a very exciting world and something I believe is very valuable to have insight into, especially later on when I am working with production. I will also learn the basics of the CAD program NX. I have not worked with CAD since my first year at Chalmers, which is now more than 5 years ago!

It is also time to say goodbye to 2016 and look forward to an exciting and eventful 2017. More experience within different areas at GKN, more company visits and meetings (especially those with the GKN leaders Kevin Cummings and Nigel Stein in February), my first “real” vacation and ending with the assignment abroad!

Happy New Years to you, dear readers!

Hi Again

Time flies and I have just started my next period on my next department, namely fabrication. Here I have got involved with an exciting improvement project involving welding. The manufacturing methodology of fabrication allows us to utilize lighter materials and exploit more suppliers to reduce the cost of their products and manufacture lighter products with reduced environmental impact. Although the usage of fabrication provides several benefits to stay competitive, it comes at the expense of handling a manufacturing process with increased complexity in terms of more advanced fixtures and additional numerous degrees of freedom for their assembling, compared to our historical methods of large castings. This concludes that the welding is an important process to optimize and sustain a statistical process control over. Those of you who have read my personal presentation here at the blog might be familiar with some of my previous experience at GKN within this field, in terms of master thesis, summer employments etc. It thereby feels like a welcome return to be part of these improvement projects again and continue the work of which we strive to continuously maintain zero deviations on all of our products and processes. It is even more exciting to return after almost 1,5 year and witness the outcome of the previous work I have participated with in the past. I look forward with enthusiasm towards the upcoming two months and what conclusions and improvements we will be able to achieve.

In addition to my assignments at the fabrication, there is much happening with the young graduate project in the short term future. During January, we will travel and visit several of the ninth grade classes in Trollhättan and talk about engineering and other ways of working with technology. Among other things, we will elaborate upon what an engineer is, what they do on a daily basis and which different paths there is to become an engineer. We will also host an inspirational event on the evening of the 17^th January. Here, we will try to talk and inspire young adolescents more about studying at high school, college, university etc. But also how to think about future careers, tips on how to apply for summer employments etc. Are or someone you know studying in the 9^th grade and might be interested? In that case, I think you should sign up for our inspirational event at aerotrainees@gknaerospace.com. Register name and number of visitors, and don’t forget that the application deadline is the 10^th of January.

A fun last note, me and David recently had our first article published in the AES News, if you are interested to learn more about RRSP-contracts, I definitely think you should check it out!

/ Niclas

Happy New Year dear readers!

What an incredible and pleasurable journey we experienced. Exciting companies, fine views and new perspectives on both ourselves and the environment. Safran Aircraft Engines (Snecma S.A) in Vernon, France offered just this – perspective.

Snecma develops and produces engines for aircraft, satellites and launch rockets. They also offer MRO (Maintenance Repair & Overhaul) business. Snecma has about 15,700 employees at 35 production and MRO facilities throughout the world.

So, what to Snecma do in Vernon and how is this related to GKN in Trollhättan? Well, Snecma in Vernon is responsible for the final assembly of the Ariane 5 launcher engine, VULCAIN 2. As you probably know, the producer of the nozzle for this engine is actually GKN Aerospace in Trollhättan. GKN Aerospace is the European Space Agency’s “center of excellence” for the space nozzles and turbines for the Ariane rocket. In short, we are good at what we do here in Trollhättan which has paved the way for an effective and long-term cooperation with those involved in the Ariane rocket propulsion technology since its start-up in the 70’s.

At our visit we had the pleasure to meet a very charismatic and eloquent guide, and apart from the perceived language barrier we experienced a very instructive and interesting tour of the Snecma facilities. We got a closer insight into the engines of Ariane 5’s predecessor, Ariane 4 but also the future Ariane 6 rocket. We learned a lot of history surrounding rocket technology and we got to see both successful and less successful designs of the previous attempts of various rocket designs. After struggling to fit into various smocks and hairnets we had the pleasure go into the premises where the final assembly of the VULCAIN 2 took place, and more sterile premises than those one have to look a long time for.

On Snecma’s area in Vernon there is also a test facility for the final assembled motors. This test facility was about the size of an Ariane rocket (about 50 meters high). After seeing a movie of an earlier engine test we were certainly impressed by the fact that the forest behind the building still stood untouched. These incredible forces that are generated and channeled through GKN’s nozzles makes one feel small. The fact that the nozzle even holds is admirable considering that the exhaust temperature is approximately 30% of the sun’s surface temperature.

Humans may be small, but we can achieve great wonders!

Last Tuesday we Graduate Engineers had the great pleasure of visiting ESTEC, ESA’s largest facility and the heart of their research and technology, situated in Noordwijk, The Netherlands. For those who doesn’t know, ESA is an abbreviation of European Space Agency and is the european equivalent of NASA. We arrived around lunch and was greeted by a few of their Graduate Engineers, with whom we had lunch. After lunch we had a lecture about the history and missions of ESA, followed by a lecture about their technology and developments considering Additive Manufacturing (AM), which is 3D-printing in metal, which is currently a super hot topic in aerospace and space industry. Apart from 3D-printing in metal, ESA are also conducting research on 3D-printing in materials found on the moon. If this can be made to work, ESA could send 3D-printers to the moon to 3D-print a lunar base. This way, the building materials would not have to be freighted from Earth.

After this extremely exciting and inspiring lecture, we received a quick visit by none other than Mr Franco Ongaro, ESAs Director of TEC. Even if he was quite a busy man and the encounter was quite short it was inspiring to get to meet him.

The day continued with a privileged tour around the facility, including among other things:

• Their CDF (Concurrent Design Facility), which is a sort of meeting room designed for lengthy meetings including lots of different experts, with the purpose of relatively quickly reach some conclusions on what the practical possibilities of different projects might be.
• Their testing facility. Here ESA conducts for example vibration testing, to make sure the developed equipment can withstand the strong vibrations encountered during lift-off. Another example is space simulation, where a satellite prototype is put in vacuum and exposed to extreme temperatures for weeks at a time to make sure the equipment operates as intended in space.

All in all the visit took somewhere between five and six hours. There is not so many times in my life that I’ve experienced something so inspiring as this visit. However after such a long visit with so much information, we all felt quite tired when we finished up.

Thank you very much for having us, ESTEC!

 

Over and out

/Joakim Åhman

After the two intense days of leadership training, personal development and deep dives into our innermost beings which David referred to in the previous post (and which by the way were held at the very enjoyable Bohusgården in Uddevalla), it was at the previous Saturday time for us to steer our big black van towards a far more far-reaching journey. This time we had our sights on an epic road trip stretching 4000km throughout large parts of Europe!

As you might already know, between our ten weeks work placements we trainees have so called activity weeks when we, apart from leadership and group development, spend our time building networks and increasing our competence by the means of visiting fellow companies within the aerospace industry. During this second activity week, as mentioned half of Europe lay at our feet and the first target was set at Fokker Services in Hoogerheide south of Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Because we had quite a few kilometers to cover, and since we were eager to enjoy everything the continent had to offer us, we started our journey early in the Saturday morning. After some pleasant hours of socializing and music listening, we arrived Bremen at dusk and had a nice dinner before settling for the night. At Sunday, we crossed the Dutch border, drove the last few hours into Amsterdam and even took us some time to fill the yearly cultural prescription by visiting the van Gogh Museum, after which is was time to prepare ourselves for a work week beyond the usual.A whole years prescription of cultural experiences filled in only a few intense hours.The well known Fokker logo and a propeller pwered Fokker 50 in Dutch KLM service.

The Dutch Fokker makes up a classic name in the history of aerospace business. The company was founded already in 1912 and has during the years of operation produced both military and civil aircrafts. Among the most recognized models, the propeller powered Fokker 50 and the jet powered Fokker 100 are to be found. Both these airliners have served as so called regional jets or city hoppers since the middle 80´s. Fokker delivered its last complete airplane in 1996 and since then the business focus is on the production of electric wiring systems and landing gears, along with the complete overhaul and service of both airplane structures and jet engines. In October 2015 GKN plc. acquired Fokker and since then it’s a part of our very own GKN Aerospace.

At the site in Hoogerheide complete overhauls of the full aircrafts are performed and the facilities have their own landing runway to be able to welcome the planes arriving for service. We trainees didn´t knew exactly which expectations to place on our visit at the site and we were happily surprised when we almost immediately nearly clashed with three big airliners already in the first of many hangars. As we in our daily work focus our attention on isolated parts of the engines, it was very much welcomed to see these parts in their bigger context, both in the form of close encounters with the mounted engines and as part of the entire airplanes on display. We were also given the chance to live out our pilot dreams when we entered a cockpit, and we experienced how an airplane cabin feels even narrower when all the seats have been removed. To state it short, the day at Fokker was nothing else but a great success!

Happy and keen to gain even more experiences we returned to Amsterdam in the evening to enjoy a cozy canal boat tour, while at the same time pumping our minds for the next engaging day to come!Beautiful installations at the Amsterdam Lights Festival.

As we wrote about earlier the graduate program is not all about exploring and developing your technical know-how. One thing that we are constantly working on is personal development. I personally find this very positive, as the rest of the group I have an engineering background and technical fields tend to have less of this in there scheme. To be able to handle different situation and have success in your career a knowing of different types of personalities are key.

During our first stay we covered the topic of what shaped us as persons. It was very rewarding both in a private and professional context. When we got together this time the topics covered where constructive feedback and personality types. We all had a chance to develop and practice our skills in a set-up environment based on the time we spent as a group so far at our graduate program. We had also the possibility to do a personality test to find out what type of strengths and weaknesses we might have according to literature. I am convinced we all received great insights which we can develop further and carry with us as we gather more and more experience in life.

Regards,

David

Hello Again

Time goes incredibly fast and it feels like you get to experience new things every day. In this way, supply chains and the role of SQA is very dynamic where every new day is different from the others. Now that the first internship is reaching is end, I thought that it would be a great opportunity to summarize some of the impressions of the initial time and my role as a future SQA. As previously mentioned, the role of SQA involves actively collaboration with suppliers and issues of quality, this leads to need of constantly keep up with the flow of information to constantly keep oneself updated. Practically this implies day to day work shaped by several emails, conference calls and other discussions. The funniest thing about this is that you get to meet a lot of different people, and especially people with deep expertise in certain areas, e.g. material or hot and cold structures. The opportunities to learn new things appears therefore to never be further than around the corner.

During the end of November and the beginning of December, I had the opportunity to travel on my first business trip abroad. It was a few days visit to United Kingdom to visit one of our suppliers. This was very interesting and educating, and we had good discussions e.g. quality and statistical process control. As you can interpret from the text above we also had several other discussions and a few visits to the manufacturing facility, but I also had a great opportunity to gain deeper insight to some of their data and measure some details in order to test an hypothesis we could decipher from previous data. This was truly educational and developing and I eagerly look forward to future company visits and business trips.

At the end of last week, it was time for the annual Christmas dinner, which the new graduate engineers host and organize in traditional Christmas spirit for old graduates and their partners. Due to my days out of office, I missed the careful preparations of the Christmas carols. I was instead in charge of the curtain, a crucial task for the audience to be able to take part of the show.

That was all for now, but keep following the blog, because soon there will be more post about the Euro trip conducted by the young graduates, and more information about some of the company visits we conducted.

Now I have slowly shifted over to work with the Aerodynamics Engineers in our department. Working with aerodynamics at a design department often involves the study of fluid flows using different programs. This is necessary to obtain information such as temperature, pressure, density and velocity of fluids, but also to optimize the profile of our products and minimize turbulence and pressure drops. Thursday last week my department (Hot structures) had a full day of activities outside GKN. The aim of the day was that the employees of Hot structures would get to know one another a little better, but also to clarify the department’s goals and strategies for the coming year and that these are in synergy with the company’s vision. After the group exercises and presentations the day was to end with a badminton tournament.

Because I’m the youngest in my department and the majority of my colleagues have a birth date as old as GKN itself (around the mid-1700s) the prognosis was good. However, after an extremely even group stage where I managed to advance on pure luck I unfortunately saw myself defeated in the quarter finals. Ironically, my opponent to beat me was our Aero Lead Engineer, the one I’ve been working with the last two weeks. The tournament itself was finally won by the department head, and whether that was a coincidence or not we leave unsaid.

I’m impressed by my colleagues showing both fighting spirit and good health not only on the badminton field but also in the daily work at GKN. Now we look forward to an exciting week of activities which takes us on a Europe trip!

Good day blog-readers!

The time on our first work placements is soon over. It’s just one week left until we change placements to our new departments. My new department will be procurement, with a focus on R&T (Research and Technology). Currently I know very little about procurement and economics, but I look forward to learning about it. As I don’t have much knowledge of the subject the plan is for me to act as a shadow to an procurement leader. I suspect I will be a “fly on the wall” (is that an expression in English?) in meetings etc.

I start at procurement the 19^th of December, but I have already made a surreptitious start. The other day I was invited by Anders Wikman (the procurement leader whom I will follow) to a meeting with a potential future supplier. Who am I to decline, I thought, and so I joined in. So yesterday we went on a day trip to meet the company. As described above, my knowledge of procurement is very limited and it was hard for me to know what I should look for in this supplier. Nevertheless I was brought into the conversation and apart from the experience being very interesting and fun, I also feel like a learnt a few things. I hope more supplier meetings will follow. I am a bit tense but also very stoked about my upcoming time at procurement!

Over and out

Joakim

As most of you probably already know, the universities around Sweden arrange career fairs every year where the students meet representatives from different companies. GKN is usually present at a lot of these fairs to attract students for summer jobs, master thesis projects, graduate employments and “regular” employments.

The first fair for this season is Armada, which is held at KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) in Stockholm today and tomorrow (22^nd and 23^rd of November). Linn and Sofie, who were graduates until this summer, are at the fair representing GKN. They can tell you a lot about the company and all the different roads you can take in order to work at a company in one of the coolest industries!

So – if you are in the neighborhood, I definitely think you should stay and talk to them. Just see how cheerful they look! 🙂