As you might now, the application period for the next year’s young graduate program is up and running. For engineers, this Tuesday 31st of March is the last day of application. So if you have not already applied, do it now!
New to this year is that we also have one place for one Economic. Since this information is posted so late, the application period for this place is enhanced to 5th of April. So all of you with background within Economics: apply!
Today, we had the honor to receive a whole class of French students and their professors from IUT Cachan in Paris, who were on a tour through corporate Sweden. The students were pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Production Engineering and were interested in our work with material handling and Lean production. Therefore, we were proud to be able to show our workshops and Lean department, as well as talk about the progress that we have made through the use of Lean tools. Since not all of the visitors were familiar with the aerospace industry, we also took some time to explain the basics of the jet engine and what parts that we produce within GKN. Trollhättan’s great spring weather also only made it easier to offer them a nice visit!
Cecilia welcomes everyone.Christian explains how a Turbine Exhaust Case works.
After a weekend that consisted of a ridiculous amount of sleeping (the trip to Kiruna demanded more of me than I realized!), we are now back in Trollhättan again. This time I’ve ended up at Anders’s home department Commercial, where I have started to explore the world of business agreements and economy. A couple of years ago I took a course in Business Economy and that knowledge is well suited now! I have only just started looking into the documents I will study during these six weeks, but I have already come across expressions like balance sheet, discounts, present value calculation, budgets and a lot more.
Exactly where my work will end up I barely know for myself yet, but I know that it is very interesting to see how an agreement with our customers might look like and how much it is to keep in mind. It might not be my speciality here, but I do believe that the more you know about your projects, the more cross-functional you can work. And cross-functionality is always good!
I do not have so much more to say for now, but I do want to remind you that the application for the next year’s graduate program is still open, so go there and apply right away!
The second day of activities continued as Anders mentioned with a visit to LKAB. Here we were given a guided tour of their facilities and we also got to visit their Visitors Mine. About 4000 people work at LKAB and if you add all the other companies working towards them you understand the importance this company has to Kiruna.
During the visit we got to learn about the mining process and how they create their iron ore pellets which are about 80 percent of LKAB’s production. It is very fascinating when you hear the volume numbers that is processed and shipped every day. Because the mining is done deep underground instead of in an open pit it puts very high demands on the operations. The Visitors mine which we got to visit were about 500 meters below ground, but the actual mining is performed at twice the depth!
Never miss out on the opportunity to take a group photo in an old mining vessel.
Another interesting aspect is that the iron vein goes down in an angle towards the city. If future mining should be possible, a large part of the town must actually have to be moved for security reasons. This is an enormous project which will be very interesting to follow in the future.
For the last day of our trip we finally got some nice weather. Too bad this didn’t happen a few days earlier since we got reports that the chance for northern light was high during our two previous nights. I guess this gives an excuse to return back to this beautiful place another time in the future. Our final stop was at IRF which is the Swedish Institute of Space Physics. Its primary tasks is to carry out basic research, education and associated observatory activities in space physics, space technology and atmospheric physics.
At IRF we were welcomed by Charles Lue, PhD and he gave us an introduction to the research and previous projects that they had been a part of.
On the top of IRFs building.
Our visit ended with a company presentation for interested students, focused on the Graduate programme. Hopefully we caught their interest and will see some of them at our site in Trollhättan in the future.
Summarizing the trip I would say that we had a lot of fun and personally learned from all the companies that we visited.
We decided to spend our third and last activity week in Kiruna, where Christian has been our guide after his time at the campus Luleå University has in the city. The rest of us were rookies north of the polar circle!
After flying up on Monday morning, we drove out to the Icehotel in Jukkasjärvi just outside of Kiruna, as we did not have any planned study visits until Tuesday morning. The hotel, complete with a church and 55 rooms in ice and snow, was pretty impressing and the guided tour was ended with a mandatory drink in the ice bar.
The Tuesday schedule was more packed, with visits both high and low at Esrange Space Center and the underground LKAB mine. The Esrange rocket launch base was first up in the morning and an especially nice visit as the work there is related to what we do down in Trollhättan. The base was founded in the 1960’s for research on the northern lights, aurora borealis, but focus has with time shifted towards all kinds of research on space, the atmosphere or weightlessness. The largest rocket currently launched at Esrange, the 16 m high Maxus, can for example reach heights of 800 km and offer 12 minutes of weightlessness before falling down to earth again.
This is how a successful rocket launch from Esrange looks! (Picture: ESA)The weather could have been better, but we got to see some reindeers on our way to Esrange
It is time for a new graduate trip. It feels like we have been living in a suitcase the last few weeks, but at least we have fun. Right now when I’m writing this, we are sitting at Arlanda airport in Stockholm and waiting for the flight that will take us to the far north of Sweden and Kiruna.
The time since Christmas has flown away and just as Christian wrote, the third internship has just ended. I was, just as Christian, at the Research and Technology department, but with a totally different task. I was asked to look at the aircraft market from a technical view. The number of airliners of the different manufacturers’ backlog was compared to the standard seating; the cabin volume of business jets was compared their respective ranges; and the fan diameters of the engines was compared to their maximal thrust. I have also started to look into the space market, which is also quite interesting! I think I produced some good pictures, but foremost I have learnt a lot about different aircrafts, how the market looks like and how it works, which parameters that are interesting to look at and which politics that affects. My supervisor turned out to be quite an expert in everything about aircrafts and he is more than happy to tell you about it!
Apart from this, the last couple of weeks have been hectic with planning for an upcoming visit from France and the approaching journey to America. I and Anders (especially Anders!) has worked hard with finding a place to live, renting a car, buying air tickets and I’m sure we will get it all together. There are still things to arrange, especially the famous application for Visa, but I guess that will turn out fine as well.
Now, as I said, there will be one week of travelling (I let Anders and Martin tell you more about that) and thereafter our last internship in Trollhättan starts before its time for us to go abroad…
It was a while ago since I last wrote anything and some things have happened since then!
First of all, I’ve done my 3rd rotation at the R&T (Research & Technology) department, where I have worked with method development. I have worked with automation and created a working method to integrate some aerodynamics calculations into an automated flow. The idea is that in the future you should be able to automatically create product prototypes from a set of customer demands and requirements on e.g geometry, performance, wight, cost and so on. This will make the process from request to offer a lot quicker and more efficient.
It’s has been really interesting to work with a part of the company that is a bit more abstract and not strictly related to production or any of our current products.
Some other news is that I will be going to our GKN site in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA for my international rotation. I’ll be a part of the introduction of some new product in the production as well as some new quality or production software tool. Much more than that hasn’t yet been decided.
I believe this will be a real adventure and I’m looking forward to experience how it is working in the USA!
Next week we will be traveling north (read Kiruna), so keep an eye out for any articles on what we’ll be doing and seeing there!
Since you as a graduate trainee belong to a group in the company that most likely has time for unplanned tasks, it is also likely that you get to take part in some unexpected events at work. One such event was the reason that we a couple of weeks ago once again was on our way to the Redditch area in the UK, this time to participate in a workshop regarding GKN’s future on invitation of Nigel Stein himself, Chief Executive of GKN Plc.
The workshop, named Future Thinking, was set to gather 50 promising persons in the ages 25-30 from all over GKN and the five of us were proud to represent Trollhättan and Sweden! Together we would brainstorm around what we saw as important in the world, the industry and at the workplace 10-30 years into the future, and how this could affect GKN. With participants from all over the world, an unconfined task like this could be pretty interesting.
Nigel Stein welcomes all
With the help of Cranfield University, the result of this brainstorming did however become fairly concise and we had in two days succeeded in creating seven project groups of eight persons each, all with their own focus area to continue to work in. The projects was in areas like alternative transportation, artificial intelligence, branding and cross-functional work and are now intended to proceed on distance for the next year, with regular debriefings to the Chief Executive Council of GKN. It will be exciting to see what the projects will come up to!
As the last visit during our third activity week, we visited aerospace department at the university in Delft, TU Delft. Professor Arvind Gangoli Rao received us with an extensive agenda for the day.
The day started with a short introduction of the department and the university as a whole, afterwards we had a couple of tours of the various testing and research facilities, including the wind tunnels (which numbered 11). We also got to see some presentations, one of a very interesting European research project (AHEAD), and a presentation of an ongoing master thesis.
Overall it was a well-planned and executed day with activities, presentations and meetings. I believe I speak for all of us when I say we got a very positive impression of TU Delft and personally I’m a bit surprised that I hadn’t heard of the university before. It is, after all, the university with the largest aerospace department in western Europe…
After the visit in Filton which Martin described in our last blog post, we did not only change city but also country and went to Holland. After some transfer buses and the usual confusion we made it to our hotel and went to sleep in our beds.
The fourth day we went to the city of Noordwijk and ESTEC – European Space Research and Technology Centre. Since our visit there was not scheduled until 1 PM, we were recommended to visit the SpaceExpo, the first permanent space exhibition in Europe (which, by the way, celebrates 25 years of anniversary this year). Here, we did not only learn about stars and planets, but also got to see how the astronauts spend their days in space, how it feels to be thrown into space in a space rocket, how high you can jump on the moon, the physics that makes our solar system work and a lot more. I’ll just let the pictures talk for themselves (with some help from captions) and warmly recommend a visit if you ever pass by!
Martin and Maria examines the inside of the ISS modelAnders jumps on the moonMe, Martin and Christian tries out the rocket launch simulator – it was bumpy!We’re back on earth!Me and Christians show the Ariane 5 nozzle – which is manufactured at our site in Trollhättan!
Greetings from space!
After a few hours at SpaceExpo, it was time to move on to ESTEC. After a thorough safety check (which we by now are quite used to) we were allowed into the area where two friends of Christian, Liselott and Anders from his student time in Luleå, met us and had lunch with us. Thereafter the tour at ESTEC began. We first got a guided tour at their museum, where they among other things have a model of the whole space station ISS and some full scale models of parts of it. We also got to see space junk that has been up in space and down to Earth again. We got to see a guided 3D tour of the space station and some really beautiful pictures which the astronauts took at our planet.
The ISS space station
After the guided tour we walked through the many buildings and met a project manager who talked about how they are using Concurrent Engineering in their development projects. For me, who have studied project management and product development models, this was a nice change to all the production facilities we’ve been visiting so far. After this meeting, we went to our last stop: a meeting with the development department of a new space robot which will go to Mars in a couple of years. There they have a 9×9 meter big area of sand and gravel which imitates the landscape of Mars. Since this robot is to be on Mars by itself, it also has to deal with mountains, canyons, rocks and sand. One of the problems the development team is facing is the fact that the signals between the control room and the robot will take so long time to reach, that they will only be able to communicate with the robot twice a day. It was indeed a very interesting talk we had with these engineers!
Liselott, Maria, Christian, Martin, me and Anders in front of the Mars landscape
Finally, we said goodbye to ESTEC and went to the little city of Leiden, where we spent the evening with Christian’s friend Liselott.
If you want to know more about SpaceExpo and ESTEC, you can use the following links:
