Aerobloggen

Our third visit where as previous mentioned to the GKN Aerospace Aesrostructures site in Filton, Bristol. But before I start to discuss the visit I just want to take the time and thank everyone that we met during the whole week. Everyone took really good care of us and I felt truly welcome wherever we went.

So about the actual visit, in Filton GKN are sharing an enormous area (74.000 m2 floor space) together with mainly Airbus. Much like us in Trollhättan, Filton is also fairly new to the company, acquisitioned in 2010 from Airbus. Because of this, the site naturally works very close with Airbus and was as late as 2014 announced ‘best performing supplier’.

Our host and coordinator for the day was Tracy and she had a truly rigorous schedule planed for us. After a shorter introduction we started with a shop floor tour through the assembly of the leading edge to the A330/A340 wings and A400M spars. This experience was in many ways differencing itself from ours by the amount of manual work. The tour followed the different assembly zones until we ended up with the final assembly. Later in the day we also had the chance to see the A380 trailing edge assembly. This assembly line was newer and had more automation implemented and the dimensions where truly astonishing. Maybe not so strange since the A380 has a wingspan of impressive 80 meters.

Besides the work shop tours we also got to see the work and development made in the area of additive manufacturing as well as a presentation of the Engineering capabilities within aerostructures by Max Brown, head of Engineering operations.

The difference using additive manufacturing from more traditional manufacturing methods is that instead of removing material from a larger structure, material is added layer by layer until the desired 3D structure is achieved. A lot of research and developing are made in the aerospace industry within this area. As the technology matures and the cost decreases we probably are going to see more and more 3D printed parts. However a lot of challenges still exist and certifying the methods for the aerospace industry will probably take some time. Below I have attached a short film regarding additive manufacturing that I personally thought was interesting.

Finally I just want to thank Filton and everyone taking care us during our visit and a special thanks to Tracy for planning our visit.

For the second activity week we turned our gaze on Europe. First stop England with visits to GKN companies in Luton, Redditch and Filton followed by a flight to Holland and a visit to the space center ESTEC as well as Delft University. I will tell you about the Luton-visit.

We started the day by picking up our rental car in London to thereafter head towards Luton. Anders, who has the merit of been driving in left side traffic before, were set to be the driver and Martin co-driver. The guys did great and an hour later we were on site.

Short introduction about the site. GKN Luton belongs to Special products and Structures segments within the Aerospace division at GKN. They manufacture windows for commercial airplanes and fighter canopies for military airplanes in different types of plastic materials and are also developing anti-icing technology among other things.

We started the visit with a similar, but far more detailed, introduction of the products that are produced on the Luton site held by Peter Bingham (aerospace trainee in England) and Matt Bachini. After lunch we had a quick and more comprehensive summary followed by a walk of the production led by the production manager Steve Long. Part of the tour was walking the process of an “arc” of plastic and its transformation in the machines to obtain the final shape of an fighter canopy.

As the nerd I am  when it comes to production I was immediately interested in the different processes, how they work and what they actually do with the material. Taking an example, it is important to ensure that the fighter canopies does not refracts the light wrong as it will affect the pilots ability to aim. It might sound easy done, but in reality not always a certain result. I also found it interesting to hear about the methods they use to improve quality, lead time and delivery precision. It is truly a privilege to have the opportunity to go on these trips and the exchange they give.

Thank you GKN Luton!

Directly after the visit our driver Anders took us towards the next destination Redditch…

Our day in the town of Redditch near Birmingham, UK, was made up by tours of offices rather than shop floors, but this made it no less interesting to us. The offices was namely the head offices of the whole GKN Group and we were there to meet Andrew Harvey and Marisa Kismul, SVP HR for Aerospace and Director HR for Engine Systems, respectively, as well as Scott MacKintosh, Digital Communications Officer.

Our meeting with Scott was interesting as he was reasonably newly employed at GKN with experience from the video game industry and therefore shared many of our experiences from starting to work within a large industrial company. We talked a lot about some IT problems that have emerged within the group as GKN in a relatively fast pace have acquired companies all over the world and what solutions and features we would like to see as Scott now has been appointed the overall responsibility of digital communications. We also talked about GKN’s presence in social media and what plans there were to increase it. A nice surprise was that Scott had read our blog and wanted to promote it throughout the GKN Group, since it was a unique example of successful external communication!

The meeting with Andrew and Marisa was also very rewarding and it was nice to see that there was such interest in the five of us and our graduate program in Trollhättan from the GKN Aerospace top management. Andrew and Marisa spoke about their careers and things they had learned along the way, but we also talked a lot about the setup of our graduate program and the differences and similarities there were with other graduate programs within the GKN Group. Just as with the IT-systems, there are many different graduate schemes within GKN, of which some have been inherited from new companies being incorporated in the group. In this, there are of course possibilities for improvements with, for example, increased exchange between the programs, which sounds good to us!

After our visit to Redditch, we steered the car towards Filton for another GKN site visit.

We are on Christmas break and the responsibility of the blog administrator is to write a Christmas card to our readers. My Christmas is celebrated with my parents, before I return home for New Year’s Eve. Even if 2014 has been an incredible year, Christmas is a well needed break with long sleepy mornings, Christmas candy and long walks in the forest with the dog. The only thing missing is the snow. Thereafter, 2015 waits for us with a trip tp Great Britain and the GKN sites theser. A journey I am excited to go on! The Christmas break and the journey may however lead to irregular blog postings until mid-January. Instead, I recommend our Facebook page!

For you to not to miss us too much, I’ll treat you with some classic humour. As an engineer you must think this is quite funny (and quite nerdy…) The question is: Is there a Santa Claus? We can find some disproofs in the laws of physics.

 

 

 

1. No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.
2. There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn’t (appear to) handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total – 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census)rate of 3.5 children per household, that’s 91.8 million homes. One presumes there’s at least one good child in each.
3. Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west(which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding etc.
   This means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man- made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second – a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.
4. The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that “flying reindeer” (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal anoint, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload – not even counting the weight of the sleigh – to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison – this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.
5. 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance – this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecrafts re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake.The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim)would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion — If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he’s dead now.

The original text you can find here.

I hope I did not destroy your Christmas entirely by killing off Santa. As a comfort, I offer you a picture from our Christmas party where we, as the tradition states, celebrated Lucia. From all of us, to all of you: A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

After the first period at my main department, I have now also started to rotate around at the different departments in the company. Instead of aimlessly jumping between departments I have decided to focus on one specific product family that I most likely will work a lot with in the future, Pratt & Whitney’s new geared turbofan engine PW1000G. I will therefore follow one project in different departments to get an overview of the engine program and the new components as quick as possible and the first stop has been at the manufacturing department. Since the project is in one of its final stages, the manufacturing department is currently working on increasing the production pace, a very interesting work to follow. After the Christmas holidays and our second activity week, I will spend six weeks at the engineering department to get to see the engineering work in the project and following that is another six-week period learning more about the project’s suppliers at the purchasing department. So far, this have been a very good setup for my year as a young graduate and  I plan to finish it with an internship abroad at our site in Newington, Connecticut.

But before all of this, we will have an awaited Christmas holiday with some time off. The first months in working life have been fun but also intense!

Christmas is approaching and so is the end of the second internship period. Production Quality has been my location for the past weeks where I have been working with problem solving in-house and towards customer. Focus has also been on process control and how to establish a continuous improvement procedure. These aspects are clearly interesting and important parts which are required when achieving a well functioning production. In our business, within aeroengines, quality is extremely important and a requsite since the standards are real tough. I like to make schematic figures, like the sand cone model, just for fun to ensure I direct my focus. Quality lays the foundation but the others I have not yet decided on where to put.

Now I will rest from the blog for a few weeks for Christmas and New Year’s. Merry Christmas and take care!

Almost three quarters of the third internship have passed and I have barely recovered from the intensive activity week of which the latest blog posts have described. If you think that being a young graduate is a piece of cake, you are mistaken. I was really tired when I came home late Friday afternoon and Monday morning I had to be on the go again!

This time I have taken over Maria’s chair in the production project she spent her last internship in. Here, I do basically three tasks, very different from each other. The first one is about doing risk analyzes and document these. The second is related to the Lean work the company do and handles several management issues. The third objective is a practical construction problem in the production which I have given the task to find a solution to. My work tasks are at least to say various and even if I am quite tired when I come home at nights, it is sure exciting to be so active in the daily work!

In addition to these three objectives, I have give myself the task to find out as much as possible about Design for Manufacturing, or DfM as it is sometimes shortened to. For you who are unfamiliar with this expression, in short it is about including the perspective of manufacturability throughout the whole product development process. In other words, I as a Design Engineer should through my design include that the product must be possible to produce in the most effective way. The manufacturability is of course not the only thing you need to consider: strength analysis, aero dynamics, cost et cetera must also be included in the design work (of this reason the method is sometimes called Design for X, or DfX). But since I am currently in production it suits me well to focus on manufacturability. I have been given the opportunity to meet and discuss some very knowing and experienced people in the area and it is very interesting! My own conclusion is that communication and team work are keys to reach DfM since one individual will never be able to include all the aspects that are needed. At least not me. It requires a lot of knowledge and experience to understand one single area of expertise, but through combining multifunctional competences we can develop good products…

Enough of my philosophy lectures for today! Hope you’re all well in the winter darkness!

It’s time again for me to report and write about what has happened since my last post!

The activity week contained a lot of, yes you guessed it, activities. The week was not only all about visits to various companies, long travels by car and sleepover at various hotels and hostels, but also a second visit to the conference and spa resort at Bokenäs.

The visit this time around was spent discussing and doing various exercises surrounding personal development and group dynamics. I was probably not the only one both physically and mentally tired upon coming home on Friday afternoon. The resort delivered, as usual, food and accommodation of highest quality and we also got an hour or so to spend in the jacuzzi and sauna, which was highly appreciated!

What ever happens at Bokenäs is, of course, classified and is not allowed to be neither spoken of or told by written text, so enough of this!

What is Christian doing now?!

Well, this is how it is. I have already spent about two weeks at the department for fatigue and strength (solid mechanics), exactly the same department where Martin spent his last placement (I’m actually sitting in his chair!). And I’m supposed to be here for another two weeks until Christmas.

I felt that this would be an interesting department to visit as I have previously studied some solid mechanics but not worked any extended time with it. What I have done so far is via some methods calculated the margin of safety for some of our products when it comes to mechanical loads. Meaning, what margins does the product have before if breaks.

I have also compared the margin of safety of various materials for the same product in order to see how the results vary, and I can tell you that they really do vary. A lot.

Last but not least, Space!

As a space engineer I might have a larger interest for the space industry and space in general than many others. Thus I feel we should bring a few really interesting pieces of recent news into the light!

What has happened?

• The eEuropeanprogram Rosetta arrived and managed to land its lander, Philae, on the surface of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. This is the first time in history we have gathered data from the surface of a comet!
• The European space agency (ESA) have decided to fund the successor to the successful Arianne 5 rocket program, Arianne 6. GKN has therefore contracts within the space industry for another 15-20 years!
• The american space organization NASA tested their new generation space program Orion, by launching it into space and completing two orbits around earth before “landing” in the ocean just outside of the coast of California. Orion is expected to bring humanity to Mars within 15 years!

There are lots of really interesting things going on in the Space industry now!

/Christian out

We also took the opportunity to visit Scania in Södertälje. At the site they do the full assembly of trucks. Just to be able to see the building process and visually follow how part after part is assembled is remarkable. It is easy to understand when standing there, how the delivery precision from suppliers must be extremely important. I took the opportunity to think of this from a GKN perspective, since some of our parts we manufacture are released directly into the assembly of aircraft engines. To me this was a bit of an eye-opener.

Still, what made the strongest impact on me was how they raise and manage problems. Already in the visiting room there was a big poster visualizing the Scania way of the Lean-house. It is clearly a company which has matured in their Lean work. Despite the fact that the production of GKN in Trollhättan is very different from Scania’s, functional vs. flow oriented, the visit gave new perspective on how Lean can be implemented. I left with lots of inspiration and ideas!

The visit ended with a presentation and general talk between graduate trainees from the two companies. Surprisingly a lot of the program setup was similar such as internal internships and an abroad internship.

Thank you Scania for letting us visit!

After the visit at Siemens, we travelled back to Linköping and Malmslätt to visit another company within GKN: ACAB (Applied Composites AB). The company has 70 employees who work with exciting material of composite, as the name implies. We were welcomed by Mats who is product development manager at the company and has been working there since the foundation in 1986. We got a cup of coffee, some gingerbreads and a very exciting discussion about the company, its products and what you can do with the composite material.

The visit was ended with a tour in the workshop where we also got the chance to look a bit closer to some of the products, e.g. products to the Swedish Military. Aside from the military business, ACAB has also customers within the transportation’s industry and aerospace, where they manufacture e.g. load bearing structures to airplane engines and the radomes to JAS 39 Gripen.

At 5.30 PM, five very tired graduates left ACAB and Linköping, grabbed a burger on the way and then went the two hours to Södertälje, ready for the next day’s adventure…