Aerobloggen

Hello everyone!

For the past two weeks, we have had workshop practice. We have all observed individual parts and their journey through the flow of operations here at GKN Aerospace in Trollhättan. Today was the final day of the workshop practice and we presented our learnings from the weeks to each other. Below is a brief description of our experience.

Elias: I spent my introductory workshop period at the Rotatives department in the X-workshop, where I followed the production sequence of an LPC (Low Pressure Compressor). The LPC is one of the first steps of a conventional jet engine, with the purpose of initializing the compression of air before the following engine parts. Rotating parts of a jet engine usually have strict requirements when it comes to tolerances, so through this workshop period, I had the opportunity to see the methods that GKN Aerospace use to accomplish these requirements. The manufacturing process included conventional machining, such as milling and lathing, but also included more advanced metallurgical control and measuring methods. In conclusion, it was very insightful to have the opportunity to observe part of GKN’s operations and see what some of the challenges are in a manufacturing process.

Emelie: During my time in the workshop, I had the opportunity to follow a product called 30k TEC. The name does not really say much initially, but 30k is a name used for motors that generate a thrust of around 30 000 lbf, or approximately 135 kN, and TEC stands for Turbine Exhaust Case, which means that it is located after the turbine in the engine. During my time in the workshop I saw the product transform from just a box of components to a finished product, which has been a lot of fun! Before this, I had never set foot in a workshop, but thanks to this experience I know a lot more about what it is like to work in a workshop. Every day I got to follow a new process, and I have learned about everything from welding and X-ray to turning and milling.

Alexander: The last two weeks I’ve spent at Structures in the C-shop. I had the opportunity to follow XWB, a large static part that resides in the Trent XWB (Rolls-Royce) engine, powering the A350-900. The part is welded together from smaller sections and if that was not cool enough, LMD (Laser Metal Deposition) is utilized to build up the profile. It has been a great opportunity to meet co-workers and gain a better understanding about the products produced in Trollhättan.

Merim: During my workshop practice I’ve been assigned to the RM12 engine, which powers Sweden’s own Gripen fighter jet. I’ve previously never seen an RM12 engine, in fact I’ve never seen a jet engine except for pictures, and to see one in reality was a real experience! I have got the privilege to see all the individual components that are inside, which all contribute to the successful operation of the engine. I am glad for getting the opportunity of seeing an RM12 engine, it has been immensely fun and I am very grateful for everything I have learned by the best within the field of RM12.

Moa: During my workshop practice I have been with the department Spools and Special Processes and followed the part LM2500. LM2500 is a part that is not used in aviation, as LM stands for Land & Marine. The part is a spool covering step 3-9 in a gas turbine compressor and is a rotating part with strict tolerances. It has been very interesting to follow the production flow of the part as it moves diligently through the plant and I have learned a lot about different processes used here in Trollhättan.

In conclusion, it has been a very rewarding time, and we are all extremely grateful to everyon that has taken the time to guide us and help us understand what they are working with! We are now looking forward starting our first rotation.

Hello everyone!

Once again, it’s time for a new group of trainees to take on GKN Aerospace and thus take over this blog. In the picture you see us posing in front of the RM12, the engine of JAS Gripen. We are a happy team from all around Sweden who in one way or another have found their way to Trollhättan. We are all very excited on what the trainee program has to offer.

Time flies and we are already at the end of our third week at GKN Aerospace. During the first week, as mentioned in the previous post, we explored Trollhättan with the trainees from 2020 to get to know them better. We also spent the end of the week learning more about the Apprentice Program, which is a collaboration with the Teknikcollege (where GKN Aerospace is included) and Nils Ericsson High School in Trollhättan. We got a crash course in turning and milling, which are common processes within all production lines at GKN Aerospace.

The second week started with a course in Jet engine theory together with the 2020 trainees since it was cancelled last year. Eight hours can be summed up in four words: suck, squeeze, bang, blow. This was followed by the start of our virtual onboarding together with trainees from the UK and US, which also went on throughout our third week. During this time, we have had the opportunity to listen to exciting guest lectures, participated in Q&A’s and developed an understanding of, for example, Power of 5 (GKN’s cultural principles), engagement and group development. We are very grateful to everyone who has taken the time to make this onboarding the best possible despite the circumstances and everyone’s busy schedules.

To summarize, the first few weeks have consisted of a lot of new and exciting insights about the program and the company. Next week, we will get some workshop experience before starting our first rotation in the beginning of October.

Until next time.

Ps.

If you want to read more about us trainees, you can click here.

Hello everyone!

Yesterday we went away to have some activates together before the summer holiday. We talked about engagement and how we can strengthen it and then we went out in the sun to play frisbee golf. Now we’re going on holiday and I can’t really understand that we’ve been here for a whole year soon! Since the start, we’ve been around on different rotations and I myself have been within production, supply chain and now finally purchasing. I have studied nonconformities , contributed to the work with the visualization of the service flow for RM12, set up project plans, learned how we work with our suppliers and identified areas of which we should focus on in the future and much more. I have gained insight into many different parts of the company and have also had time to get involved in both a Sustainability Workstream and the board of Young@GAS.

As a trainee group, we have had a project together where we worked on behalf of the composite lab in our Global Technology Center where the goal has been to develop a product to be able to perform safe knife changes and to review their forming station. We have also attended various trainings, gone to the air flotilla F7 in Såtenäs, visited Aeroseum, participated and planned both fairs and events and we of course hope for even more in the future.

When we return from the vacation, it’s soon time to welcome both new trainees and “tekniksprångare” to us and we really long to be able to meet physically again! Of course, the pandemic has canceled some of our planned activities, but we’re keeping our fingers crossed, that by autumn, we will be able to get away a bit more. Above all, we hope for a visit to Bristol, just outside London, to visit our sites and one of our newly built Global Technology Centers located there!

I wish you all a really nice summer and you will hear from us again in the autumn!

My

Hello everyone! It’s been a while since our last update which is a result of us being occupied with our rotations and a project which all 5 of us conduct together. It really feels like we can see the light in the end of the tunnel with summer approaching and that we are in the final stretch of the pandemic situation. Something that we feel is being reflected on the company as well.

A great indication of this is the current investments being done on our site here in Trollhättan. A couple weeks back, we announced the plans to build a new workshop where component repairs will be performed. As our products are manufactured with expensive and advanced materials, such as titanium and super alloys, maximizing the utilization and extending the lifecycle is important to reduce material consumption.
This is completely in line with our desire to make aviation more sustainable for the future. Repairs are also less expensive than replacing the parts and hence will this workshop also lead to cost reductions for our end customers and enable us to improve and strengthen our position within additive manufacturing and advanced repair methods, a win-win situation!

I’m excited to see the development of this new workshop and how it can contribute to increased employment and business opportunities! You can read more (in Swedish) here.

For my own part, I started my new rotation on Strategy & Business Innovation after the Easter holidays. As my previous rotations has been within the Engineering organization, this is something completely new for me and that is one of the benefits about being a trainee, you get the freedom to try new disciplines and expand your professional network.
More specific, I am working with continued development of an estimation model for the aerospace aftermarket including maintenance, repair and overhaul. This is an important part of our current and future business, something that is evident in regards to the site expansion I mentioned in the beginning of the post.

I hope you’re all doing well and I’d also like to congratulate all of the students that have written their master theses at GKN Aerospace during the last couple of months. The presentations are ongoing and within a couple weeks they will all be graduating from their universities.

Until next time,
Jens

Hi all!

It is a couple of weeks since you heard from me the last time here at the blog. I have just completed an exciting and intensive rotation at supply chain for military and space, which I had the great pleasure to work on together with my graduate colleague My.

As you have seen in our earlier posts, the first months of this year been quite full of tasks not related to our rotations. We have participated in multiple student fairs at the biggest technical universities in Sweden, done company presentations and taken part in the try outs for this year’s graduate group. In addition to this, we had our first “global” development week in the beginning of March. Even if our group is not global at all, since the five of us in Sweden were the only ones recruited to the graduate scheme last year at GKN Aerospace. Due to this there were a couple of other employees from England, Netherlands and Romania invited to participate in the development week. The development week was very successful and appreciated by us graduates.

The main assignment that My and I worked on during our rotation was to investigate the possibilities to implement a digital visualization of the MRO workshop at the Trollhättan site. This type of digital visualization already exists for the civil production, and it is used to give personnel a quick overview of the status of the production flows during the 24h pulse and planning meetings.     

The first weeks of the rotation were mainly spent on learning how the different service flows for the RM12 engine are structured and also learning how the existing visualization function. The information we gathered were then used to identify in which areas, either the visualization or the way of working, needed to be changed in order to make them compatible with each other.

The challenge with MRO flows is that each and every engine part that enters the workshop is unique, unlike in production where every part goes through the same series of operations. To cope with the uniqueness of the different parts that enters the MRO flow requires flexibility. Flexibility is unfortunately not something that is easy to incorporate in a fully automatic visualization.  

The solution that our investigation resulted in was a compromise where both the way of working and the visualization had to go through a couple of changes. The results from the investigation led to a pilot project being started to test the new form of visualization. The both of us worked a lot with this pilot project as well since it was a very natural step to take after the investigation were finalized.

This was a short summary of what I did during my last rotation, during the next rotation will I work at Programs towards General Electric, which will be interesting and completely different from what I have done during my first two rotations.

Best,

Marcus

Hello!

I hope you all are staying safe out there! I believe I speak for most of us when I say I am more than ready for this to be over so we can all return to work at our awesome site.  

This week the annual event of selecting new graduates here in Sweden took place and it is safe to say that all of us soon to be old graduates got a real reality check on how fast time surpass here at GKN. I mean it has already been a year since we were sitting on the opposite side of the table ourselves. Anyway, it was a lot of fun being a part of all the events and meeting the candidates for the upcoming graduate scheme.

Since last time I was here a lot has happened in my personal journey within the graduate program. Just after the Christmas holidays I jumped from the quality department to project management of NPIs (New Product Introductions). Already from early days this was a rotation I knew I wanted to do. I believe that being a part of this “grey zone” when everything is still uncertain is the best place for learning. In combination with all the different functions and people you meet on a daily basis it seemed like a great opportunity for me.

My rotation itself is sort of split into two parts. One where I am working on a project to see how we can enhance learning in the project management process. The project will seek to see whether there is another way that we can identify, document, and reusage knowledge within and between projects. The other part of my rotation is to be involved and support with different tasks in an ongoing NPI project. The NPI project is a fabricated fan case mount ring which will be included in Pratt & Whitney’s PW1000 engine family (see picture). Perhaps a fan case mount ring doesn’t sound too exciting but when it involves additive manufacturing I believe everything gets exciting. My tasks have been aligned with my interest in the field of quality as I have been driving the work for the PFMEA (process failure modes & effects analysis) which essentially is a preventive risk analysis to detect risks before they occur.

That was all until next time. In the meantime, take care!

// Robin

Hello everyone!

The snow has melted away here in Trollhättan and one can perhaps expect (hopefully!) the spring to arrive soon! We, the graduates, are in a relatively busy period with both common and individual projects happening at the same time. In addition to that some us are appointed to other projects not related to our rotations or the trainee group itself.

As we say in every new blog post, time really flies and it’s already time for us to start thinking about our next rotation as the current one will be finished before the Easter holidays. Both my previous and current rotation is focused towards calculations and analysis I will probably look into learning more about market & strategy in my next rotation. That’s the strength of the trainee program, being able to discover and learn about something completely new.

We’ve also started our shared trainee project which will go on for about 6 months. Our mission is to investigate different solutions for an automated composite manufacturing system. This is being done at Centre of Production Technology which is located at Innovatum in Trollhättan.  This is where GKN Aerospace and University West alongside other companies perform research on additive manufacturing and industrial automation. A short presentation video, although in Swedish, can be viewed below.

Normally, the trainees attend different career fairs and hold lectures on both universities and high schools. However, due to obvious reasons regarding the pandemic, these fairs and lectures are replaced this year by digital versions. The last couple weeks we’ve attended digital career fairs on Chalmers, Luleå University, Linköping University and Karlstads University which was a first for most of us. These career fairs were very successful and exceeded our expectations even if we’d all like to be onsite and meet people face-to-face!

Due to the same reason we haven’t been able to visit high schools to have inspirational lectures. But I, Emma and Marcus recorded a lecture last week which was targeted towards high school students graduating this year. We presented the company and shared our thoughts regarding university studies. Even though it felt a little unusual to stand before a camera in a studio environment it is these assignments that make the graduate program so fun and diverse!

I hope you all have a nice weekend!

Jens

Some time ago all graduates took part in a sustainability workshop hosted by the man in the picture, Zakir Hussain. The session turned out to be very inspiring and informative regarding GKN’s sustainability vision. We thought, who else than the host himself would be an ideal person to inspire a couple more. So, with us today we have Zakir Hussain talking about his own journey and why sustainability is important to him and GKN.

Hi my name is Zakir Hussain, a Global Grad from the UK. I joined the organisation in September of 2019 fresh out of university, where I studied Chemical Engineering. During my studies, I never thought I would be joining the Aerospace industry. However, when I attended my interview, I felt “this is a place I would see myself growing and developing in. GKN’s community seem to really care about who I am rather than focusing on what I am”. So I took the leap of faith and haven’t looked back since!

At GKN I have been given some really great opportunities to work on projects which are really significant. Such as, designing and implementing an Automated Defect Reporting System which combined tools from Lean Six Sigma and Industry 4.0, market analysis on Horizon 3 technologies for new business opportunities and to lead GKN’s Energy, Waste & Emissions Workstream for creating the Sustainability Strategy to help the organisation improve on its global sustainability. I have had real control over how much responsibility I would like as well as being able to pave my own career path. Moreover, I have had great opportunities to work and collaborate with seniors within the organisation very early on, such as The Director of Sustainability and The Vice President of Global Manufacturing Engineering Capability. For those who are considering GKN, I would say, ultimately you are really in control of the how, who and when elements of making your career fly!

There is a great support network here at GKN, ranging from mentors, coaches and buddies. These parties will look to support and guide you the best way they can, ranging from giving advice based on their personal experience good or bad to coaching you through how to find the answer and putting you in contact with parties whom may have the answer. In addition to this, in line with GKN’s principle of “Open and Honest” there is a real sense of comfort when seeking out support and help from all parties.

One key area of interest I have is Sustainability. Sustainability has been close to my heart for a large part of my life, during my university education I had a great deal of exposure to the issues, we as a race, are facing today which will be further exacerbated for future generations. I strongly believe as an engineer, there is an obligation to ensure society’s needs are being met in a sustainable way to not hinder future generations from meeting their needs.

Sustainability has become a real focus for GKN Aerospace in the past year. Being a Tier 1 company, GKN has a real opportunity to leverage its position in improving its own sustainability as well as its suppliers and customers. At the end of 2020, a new energy contract was signed, for all the Dutch sites to use 100% renewable electricity. This resulted in GKN reducing its global GHG emissions by 8-11% on a yearly bases. Moreover, to increase awareness and knowledge of the topic, I am leading a team where we are creating an e-learning module for our Manufacturing Engineers which will be rolled out and used globally. So far, from our beta-version, we have seen an increase in awareness and knowledge by 36%!

Thank you for taking the time to read what is ultimately, a testimony that GKN Aerospace is a great place to work.

Thank you,

Zakir Hussain

A Proud Graduate