Aerobloggen

Seven weeks have already passed since I started at GKN Aerospace. My first rotation is at a department responsible for the introduction of new products, estimating cost for new businesses and global projects within GKN Aerospace Engine Systems. It’s at this department where I will start working after the trainee-period.

During the seven weeks I had two assignments. The first assignment is a part of a global project within manufacturing engineering, which aims to enhance delivery precision and cost reduction of poor quality by improving the robustness of our processes and to work in a standardized way throughout the Aerospace division. The second assignment is regarding control reduction of a newly introduced high volume product. The aim is to show that the process is stable enough to remove a control operation.

Yesterday the workshop period ended with a tour of the different workshops. All trainees got to show where they have been working during the workshop period and which value streams they have followed. It was extremely rewarding to share the experiences from various parts of the business and I believe that the experience gained will most likely come in handy during the rest of the trainee period.

Quality, precision and excellence. These words describe my overall impression of the business after having spent two weeks in the area where the value literally is created; in the workshops.

With previous experience within the manufacturing industry, I immediately felt at home in the manufacturing area at GKN. However, I quickly realized that my perception of what high quality really is had to be reappraised, because at GKN Aerospace, quality has been taken to new heights. At this company, quality is measured not only in hundredths of a millimeter, but in thousandths of a millimeter.

This was an eye opener for me and is definitely something that I will take with me in future assignments within the company. I just hope that this insight won’t affect my everyday life, because it’s not really time efficient to use a slide caliper to make sure that the shoe laces have exactly the same length on both sides of the knot, especially when you need to hurry for the 05:10-bus in the morning.

Hi and welcome to a new beginning of Aerobloggen!

As you may have noticed, the old cover photo has been replaced with a new one. A new group of young graduates have entered the program and will be providing new content to this blog. This time, the regular five entrants will be joined by two more from the international graduate program of GKN.

My name is Mikael, I’m the guy in the far left corner of the picture, and by my side I have Dennis and Daniel leaning over an RM 12 jet engine. Toni, Linn, Sofie and Gustav are seated in the front. If you’re curious of who is who and why, you will soon be able to read about us in the Our young graduates section (I might be in there already ;-O).

Familiar followers of the blog, or if you’ve just read the last post from Cissi, probably know how the graduate program usually take shape. We will be assigned different tasks throughout the site in Trollhättan along with study visits and activities and during the last three months leave for an internship abroad. We’re all very eager to see what is to come! We’ll keep you updated through periodic posts here in the blog. Also, stay tuned for information about the international graduate program, which we at the time of writing know little about.

After the last week’s introduction, we are currently out in the production, learning about the manufacturing of aerospace components. More of our experiences will be shared in up-coming posts.

See you soon!

Mikael and the others

After two weeks of relaxing vacation I am since last week back at the office in Trollhättan. The other graduates are still on vacation, but I chose to have a short one this year to get some sun in another country in later autumn. So I am already at my new desk where my work as a Design Engineer in the GEnx TRF project has just begun. Last week, it was almost spooky quiet here since the most of my colleagues were still on their vacation, which, if I’m being honest, made my days pretty slow. Not that I didn’t have anything to do; my colleagues have given me an enormous amount of reports, power points and web pages to read through. It was a good start since it gave me a crash course of the product, but after eight hours of technical reading each day my brain was pretty bruised. And here I though the studies were over for my part? Nope! So I’m looking forward to begin the “real work” now when my colleagues are back.

The “GEnx TRF”, what is that then? GEnx is one of GE’s engines that is being used in Boeing’s air crafts 787 Dreamliner and 747-8 (there are two versions of the engine, one for each air craft). The abbreviation stands for “GE Next Generation”. The abbreviations are by the way almost the hardest thing to understand… For those who understand technical data, I can tell that the engines have take-off thrust of 66,500-76,100 lbf, a fan diameter of 2,8 meters respectively 2,7 meters and has a 15% lesser fuel consumption that CF6, another of GE’s engines. I actually had the opportunity to look at the fan case when I was in Newington; it is a pretty impressive sight! TRF stands for “Turbine Rear Frame” and is the part in the end of the engine. It is also a quite amazing product since it has to withstand the high temperatures in the rear of the engine and the big loads it is subjected to, among other things.

Another fun thing is that we a couple of weeks ago got the names of the GKN graduates 2015/2016 that starts a month from now. The curiosity is great of course! Up till then the blog will probably be pretty calm, even if I surely pop in here every once in a while.

Keep calm until then!

The work done over here is going towards its end. Before I leave I will present my work together with a few written reports that will be useful for the person continuing the work after me. A methodology how to evaluate a ceramic structure using FEM will be covered together with a material test plan. Beside standard analytical work I have put in a lot of hours into research regarding behavior of ceramic materials.

For about a week ago I got the chance to celebrate my first 4th of July. The only time a seen people being this nationalistic before is when I been watching the Sweden national team of Soccer play in the European or World cup. The day started off with a short glimpse of the parade that is held in Huntington each year. Some pretty impressive arrangements could be seen, but I couldn’t stay too long since me and one of the other Swedes was arranging a Swedish midsummer lunch.

Previous week the 737 Max programme reached an important milestone with the first delivery of Ti-honeycomb inner wall and of course this was celebrated with cake!

I would also like to mention an initiative from the Driveline division a couple weeks ago. Every year there is a student event at Silverstone England called Formula student. For you that are now to this it is a competition were student teams from 25 countries compete against each other with Formula cars that they built themselves. During the days at Silverstone the car is tested and evaluated through different challenges and the team with the highest total score wins.

GKN has been sponsoring this event for several years with people on site to represent the company in different ways. As an extra “THING” this year four engineers will drive cars that GKN have participed in making from Lohmar to Silverstone. The trips will be documented on GKN social media like Twitter and Linkedin. In addition to this GKN also has a temporary webpage up and running exclusively for this competition.

So check out the following social media for more information and see what’s been going on.

#GKNJourneyTo #fs2015 #GKNSelfie

http://www.gknformulastudent.com/

Over here in Newington the work has come up in pace as the internship is coming to an end. At the purchasing department, I have been busy with keeping track of stock levels and incoming deliveries as well as planning for future orders. In parallel I have also performed a value stream mapping of parts of our production here and explored the many abilities and shortcomings of the SAP ERP system. In short, many of the things I learned when taking my masters in supply chain management have come to surprisingly good use!

After mainly have followed a supervisor during the past year, it has been really fun to have more responsibilities in fields I am actually educated in. However, it is unfortunate that my internship has come up to speed, just as it is time to go home. Next week is the last one at the Newington site for Cecilia and me.

If you have followed this blog for a while you may remember Futuer Thinking, a GKN project that we graduates have been a part of since January. In this, we have worked on distance in our project groups, which of course have continued here in the US. This work has also taken more of my time recently, as my group has narrowed our scope to an interesting field. With a start in the wide subject of artificial intelligence we worked our way down to Industry 4.0, which is anticipated to become the next big industrial revolution – the “smart” factory. Hopefully, we will be able to come up with ideas and approaches to how GKN should take the step into Industry 4.0.

 

Happy midsummer to all of our readers! For you who don’t know this fine Swedish tradition, I recommend the following short youtube-video.

For us Swedish abroad, the evening did not turn out as usual, but me and Anders still got some summer feelings in New York. Every year the Swedish general council of New York arranges a traditional Swedish midsummer celebration. So with the goal set for the south end of Manhattan, me and Anders left the office early this Friday, took the car to West Haven and from there the train to New York. Already on the station in West Haven we saw the first Swedish flag and when we finally reached our goal, Swedish speakers were everywhere in what seemed to be just as any midsummer celebration! The smell of strawberry cream cake and meatballs lingered in the air; little children played tag on the grass; and accordion music was played from the little stage.

What might give it away was the Statue Liberty in the background and those New Yorkers with confused expressions as they walked pass the area. Some dancing around the midsummer pole was also arranged, film is available HERE.

About 8 PM, the tradition kept on going with tipsy Swedish people and we decided that we had a long way back to Manchester. After a short stop at Times Square, we finally sat on the train back to West Haven and an hour after midnight, two tired but happy Swedes were back in their beds.

Tomorrow, a new work week begins. For me, this week will be slightly different than those before. The implementation of the SPC software system is ready enough to be used out in the workshops, and therefore all of the operators and quality and manufacturing engineers are to be educated in SPC (Statistical Process Control) and how to use the software. Since we want to keep the classes small we will be holding lectures all week. It’s going to be a hard but fun week which I believe will just fly away! And afterwards, we only have three weeks left before it is time to say goodbye to GANE. I am actually looking forward to go home, so that feels quite good. But first, the rest of time in the US is to be enjoyed and until we speak again, I say: see ya!

Once again it’s time for Christian to report from Cincinnati!

About two weeks ago I got the chance to visit one of our customer’s manufacturing plant here in the Cincinnati area. GE Aviation has got the manufacturing plants for their engines CFM56, CF6, LM2500, LM6000 and LMS100 among others, in the Evendale area.

The visit was arranged with help from some people working at the commercial department here at our site and we got a guided tour through the manufacturing of specifically CF6 and CFM56.

Both engines has got a long history and many of the airplanes flying today has got either of these engines mounted. As a matter of fact, the CF6 engine made it’s debut in 1971 on the well known Douglas DC-10. The CFM56 was a little later, getting it’s first order in 1979 to upgrade the existing Douglas DC-8.

You could really say that these two programs has been both very successful as well as long lived.

What was most fascinating about the visit was the possibility to see where our components fit into the manufacturing and, on the safest way possible get as close to the end product as possible.

It’s hard to imagine how such a complex construction will be responsible of propelling a vehicle transporting both goods and people all over the world, at an altitude of over 10.000 meter! You can’t be anything other than impressed by the ingenuity of the human race!

Today, Cecilia and I have finished the first half of our internship here in Newington! The work in the office is progressing and there is unfortunately not much to report on that part at the moment. But more interesting things have been happening outside of work.

Here in the states we do not get to enjoy the Swedish spring’s many holidays, like Ascension Day and Labor Day on May 1^st, but we are somewhat compensated by the holiday on the last Monday in May – Memorial Day. On this day, the country is remembering all the American soldiers who died while serving the country’s armed forces and is therefore often honored with military parades, an American cultural experience worth seeing as a visiting foreigner.

Because of the long weekend, Cecilia and I took a road trip to Cape Cod, a peninsula on the Atlantic coast of Massachusetts about 2 h from Hartford. After spending one day on the cape and one day on the island Martha’s Vineyard just off the coast, we arrived in the town of Plymouth on Memorial Day. Since the town is the place where the pilgrims arrived and established the first colony in 1620, it felt like suitable place to honor Memorial Day.

Our own Swedish National Day this Saturday will however be celebrated in New York City, as we will be paying a visit to the just opened One World Trade Center observation deck high above the streets of Manhattan!