Aerobloggen

A couple of weeks ago my trainee companion Hampus wrote about additive manufacturing (AM) and compared the functionality of the technology in real life versus the “Buzzword” and its expectations. With that, I though it would be a fun subject to continue with, but regarding agile work methods instead.

You probably already know something about the subject, under the last period of my studies it felt like I heard it from every company I talked to. Everybody “works agile” and pushed on the fact that this is the way to go for organisations to be able to still be a strong contender in their respective industry. Although, since no company actually explained why they used that method and merely spoke about the positive affects without any concrete explaination I got a relatively negative association to the buzzword. It only felt as is the companies brought it up to be trendy and be seemed as an attractive employer for newly graduated students.

For you who has never heard of it before, or you who are where I stood earlier and only heard the positive sides of it without any clear explanation to why that is; here is a short introduction to what the agile method actually is.

The easiest way to explain the agile working method is to compare it to the traditional methods, the so called waterfall method. In this classic project methodology you use sequential phases such as define, build, test and release. Every phase has to be completed before moving on to the next and the project can not go back to a previous stage. Most commonly you work with the entire product you want to release in to the market. However, with the agile methodology you are using iterative cycles where you have the same four steps as mentioned previously but you do it in small batches (sprints) multiple times instead where you work with a smaller part of the whole product during each batch (increment). For an easy comparison between the two methodologies, see figure underneath.

After learned more about the concept and had the opportunity to be involved in a team at GKN utilising this way of working I have to say that all of my negative associations towards the buzzword has completely disappeared, since you can clearly see the advantages it provides. But instead of me talking your ears off it is better if I just list the top three things I believe that agile working improves.

Reducing complexity and difficulty while planning (define phase)

Since perfect information does not exist the waterfall method is difficult to use proficiently in real life, due to the fact that you will learn more about the market, the product and future possibilities over time. This makes it less optimal when completing the planning stage which is what is done in the very beginning of the project, since the circumstances will most likely change. With an agile method of working the planning is instead done in each interactive cycle, which leads to being more flexible when it comes to changes.

Focusing on the real value of what the product can provide

You usually say that 80 percent of the value comes from 20 percent of the functionalities in a product. In the waterfall method you do not know what these 20 percent are until you deliver the product to the costumer who will find it themselves through using it. The agile method, however, creates small increments at a time instead of delivering the entire product immediatly. This provides the opportunity of showcasing these increments and communicating with the costumer which will further lead to finding the real value, and furthermore be able to focus on the imporant parts.

Reducing risks

Working with the agile method will also reduce risks during the product development stage through always delivering and presenting the increments of the finished product to the costumer. This will cause feedback to come at early stage in the process and as a result decreasing the time and cost of possible corrections, in comparison to doing changes on a complete product if the costumer is not satisfied.

Hope this small introduction to the buzzword “agile” was useful and provided a brief understanding that it actually provides more value than just marketing the product!

/Rasmus Tyft

As most of you already know, every year the universities all over Sweden hosts different job fairs where the students can meet ambassadors from various companies. GKN is usually present at the majority of these fairs to inform the students of available summer jobs, thesis work, regular positions as well as the trainee program. This season’s first fair is called Armada and is hosted by KTH (the Royal Institute of Technology) in Stockholm today and yesterday (November 19th-20th, 2019). On site we had Tim Hallor, Erik Knutsson and Peter Emvin who represented GKN Aerospace.

On Wednesday, a career and trade fair was held at Lyrfågelskolan in Trollhättan. All the GKN Graduates in Trollhättan were there and talked about GKN, informing about Industritekniska programmet (ITU) that is part of GKN High School and what opportunities there are for working with technology. The ITU program has existed since 1992 and is both a college preparatory and a trade education. During the day we met several students who have a great interest in technology and it was fun to discuss what opportunities exist in the industry. We also had two ITU students with us Nora Fröberg and Ruben Östlund who are in the third year of the ITU program, they explains a little more detail about why you should choose this program. Now we can only hope that we have awaken an interest in technology in the students, who hopefully might be our future colleagues.

This was all from me this time, see you again soon!

/Elamin

Hello again! It’s time for a new post!

This past weekend, we were given the opportunity to be judges for the first LEGO League regional competition here in Trollhättan at Innovatum. 15 teams from the region were given the opportunity to participate in the technology competition and compete for a place in the Scandinavian final in Roskilde, Denmark. Of course, GKN, which is a main sponsor of the competition, will be a part of the judges and we the Graduate Engineers were given that honor. This year’s theme is City Shaper, designed to inspire curiosity in architecture and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). The competition is for students to program a LEGO Mindstorms robot to collect points on a course but also to work in groups and try to solve a social problem linked to this year’s theme, which is challenges in our cities and communities. As a former contestant and judge in First LEGO League, I think this competition is a great opportunity for youth to learn more about technology and programming.

Our job as a judge is to rate each group in four smaller areas where we were divided as Competition judges, Robot Desig Judge, Project Judge and Core Values Judge. The team that accumulates the most points wins the grand Champion Prize and are given the opportunity to participate in the Scandinavian final. During the course of the competition, all teams in the competition have done a brilliant job with their assignments. We judges got to experience a high level of programming, execution of assignments, strategies and collaboration.

A big congratulations to Byhålans Eliter from Centralskolan in Grästorp who performed a brilliant job and won the grand Champion prize!

Hi there!

This week has been full of meetings with value stream managers, planning our future assignments and travels as well as a nice visit from the Siemens trainees from Finspång! They were interested to know more about what GKN Aerospace is doing and how we work out in the factories, so of course we took it upon us to take them in and to show them around. It was a lot of fun having them here since they are developing gas turbines, which is very similar to an airplane engine. Both of them are partially made out of a gas generator, it is just that we are using it to create propulsion for the aircraft and they are using it to generate electricity, for example. Although, theirs are a lot bigger and heavier since they are used on ground level, and ours need to be light enough to not weigh down the entire plane. After the visit we went to a restaurant here in Trollhättan for a dinner together which was really nice! Now we are really excited to visit Finspång to see their site and how they are working with their products since they are so similar to ours, but used in such a different way.

 

It’s been a few weeks since we started our first rotations at our home departments and we’d like to think that we know what we’re doing by now. Well, at least we’ve learned a ton of abbreviations which you’ll soon get a taste of! I was thinking I’d write a bit about what I work with at the Global Technology Center (GTC), namely additive manufacturing or AM for short.

Additive manufacturing is a collection of manufacturing techniques that are based on building a geometry through layer-by-layer deposition of material. The most well-known example are desktop 3D printers that depose molten plastic through a movable nozzle. Nowadays they can be bought for a few hundred bucks at Amazon. At GKN we work with metal AM (MAM), which require machines that cost a few hundred thousand or millions of dollars instead.

AM generates a lot of hype in general and specifically so in the aerospace industry. In comparison to for example the automotive industry we produce low volumes of products, which means the low deposition rate of AM processes is not as much of a problem. AM gives larger freedom in design than conventional manufacturing methods, for example by allowing internal voids in areas where material is not needed. This means that we can create a mathematically optimized design to minimize the weight of a component in relation to its performance. Lower weight means less fuel consumption and environmental impact – High five, Thunberg! Another advantage is in products that would otherwise require joining of multiple components. One example here is the rotor of our concept rocket engine Prometheus, which by use of AM has reduced the number of components from over 100 to just two (!!!).

At my department we primarily work with LMD-W, which stands for Laser Metal Wire Deposition. In LMD-W molten metal is deposited on the substrate (the “base”) by laser heating of a metal wire, held by a robotic arm. The primary focus is to build features such as flanges on large structures, for example a product called Fan Case Mount Ring. Currently, the material is bought as a titanium forging weighing roughly 550 kg and is then machined to a final weight of about 80 kg. Instead, we may start with a forging of 80 kg, add 25 kg of flanges and other features by LMD-W and then machine to a final weight of 75 kg or so. We have then reduced the amount of material wasted by 94 %, which once again is an enormous environmental improvement!

Given what AM is capable of it’s hard not to hype the technology – what could possibly be sexier than lasers, robots and reduced environmental impact?