During the last two weeks a group at GKN in Trollhättan has been printing safety visors for hospitals, clinics and nursing homes in the nearby region. The printers, which are usually used to manufacture prototypes and tools, have been running non-stop to meet the demand. At the end of this week we will have delivered some 500 visors. We expect the demand to remain high, so we will probably keep making them as fast as we can for a while.
The help has been much appreciated by the healthcare workers and we are happy to be able to contribute. Nobody can do everything, but everybody can do something!
Our first large delivery was to the ambulance unit at Norra Älvsborgs and Uddevallas hospital. From the left: Martin Thordén – President at GKN Aerospace Sweden, Hampus Olsson, Nina Nordberg, John Eborn, Jasmin Källberg, Jari Lamminluoto.
It’s been a busy week
in Trollhättan, both considering activities at our current department rotations
and activities with the trainees.
At my current department I work alongside one of our most senior manufacturing engineers in exciting projects where we are investigating concepts and business cases for future opportunities to introduce additive manufacturing. We also partake in the daily work with one of our existing high volume products, the intermediate compressor case for an engine called PW1100. It is a Pratt & Whitney engine which you can find on the Airbus A320 Neo. It’s a quite different tempo when working close to manufacturing compared to technology development, which is what I did last fall.
With the trainee group we’ve done a lot of preparations for next week, when it’s time for… *drum roll* … Graduate selection! It will be two packed days where we will get to meet our future colleagues. We’ve been waiting eagerly since January!
The time had come to leave the West Coast and to meet the rest of our Global Graduates in Charleston, South Carolina. It was great fun to get back together with our friends that we last met in September. Now it was time to start Training week 1 with workshops in self-awareness, personal image and communication skills. As expected, the workshops were both fun and useful, for example we got to work on our presentation skills using the ABCD framework (Google it!).
During the Wednesday we had a study visit at the GKN plant in Orangeburg, about an hour outside Charleston. There we got an introduction in the technologies they work with and the products they produce. This was the fourth facility we’ve visited as Global Graduates but the first on the Aerostructures side of the business, which is the largest product group. It was cool to see how lip skins (the front “edge” of the engine, very important for aerodynamic performance!) are formed, for example to be used in the newly developed GE9X engine. GE9X won the Guinness World Record for strongest commercial jet engine, showing the ability to produce nearly 600kN of thrust – enough to lift a weight of 61 tons! This engine will be used for the new Boeing 777x, which recently had its maiden flight.
The Boeing 777x with the enormous GE9X engine.
In addition to this, we had a course in Zero Defects, which is an important tool being deployed throughout the aerospace industry right now. Zero Defects is a work standard aimed at the reduction of defects in products through prevention. In the aerospace industry, we have extremely high requirements of product quality – after all, nobody wants to put people’s lives at risk by using damaged or defective goods. Therefore, it is important that everyone in the industry works together to create safe products.
Happy trainees after a busy day at the Orangeburg site!
The Tuesday was spent visiting Carlton Forge Works, which is one of our primary forging suppliers for parts in titanium and high temperature alloys. We met Stephen Schneider and his colleague Brian, who gave us a crash course in their on-site forging processes and a detailed tour of their workshop – so cool! Forging is one of the most dramatic manufacturing processes there is. Despite it being “winter” in California, the air in the forgery was hot and heavy from enormous furnaces and parts that had been heated red-hot in preparation for forming.
From the left: Elamin, Hampus, Elin, Scott, Rasmus, Brian and Emily
On the way home we drove by the SpaceX headquarters and took a quick peek at the Falcon 9 booster which is standing just outside the building – it was the first of its kind to manage a vertical landing after launch.
Falcon 9 booster
Visit at Skaraborg Air Force Base and glögg mingle
Last week, together with the senior class at the GKN-partnered high school and the local interns, we visited the Skaraborg Air Force Base F7 in Såtenäs outside of Trollhättan. We were given a very interesting lecture by a retired JAS 39 Gripen pilot and a tour of the hangars. F7 is a military unit and one of the Swedish Armed Forces’ most important air force bases, one of the reasons being that it houses the educational centre for JAS 39 Gripen pilots. Besides the Gripen the base also take care of all activities related to transport- and special aircraft, with missions for the government and international endeavours.
The group posing in front of a Gripen fighter in one of the hangars.
The trainees also organized a glögg mingel (glögg is a Swedish take on mulled wine but don’t worry, it was legal!) for Flying members, a group of current and previous trainees at GKN Aerospace in Trollhättan. We served homemade saffron buns (a Swedish christmas classic) and glögg in a cozy setting and performed a by several sources exceptional Luciatåg (Yet another Swedish tradition, in eng. St. Lucia’s parade). Indeed, the Luciatåg was so appreciated that it is now demanded a re-run at this week’s christmas party. Current and previous trainees are still in negotiations behind closed doors and a resolution will not be presented at a press conference during the day.
Additive manufacturing at GKN – Buzzword and reality
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.
3D-printer for hobby enthusiasts.
Metall-3D-printer på GKN Aerospace.
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 (!!!).
Viktoptimerad AM-komponent för Boeing tillverkad av GE.
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!
Schematic of the LMD-W process.
Laser Blown Powder (LMD-P) is a sister technology to LMD-W which is also developed at GKN Aerospace.
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?
Finally it is time for the first real post by this year’s trainees! “The ancient ones” are soon leaving Sweden for their work abroad rotations and it is time for new blood in the trainee cabin here in Trollhättan.
The reason for the delay (we did start working here about a month ago) is mostly the two week “onboarding” program together with all new trainees at GKN Aerospace worldwide. In total, 27 trainees from the US, Netherlands, England and Sweden were here, pretty awesome! We spent the first week in Gothenburg doing various workshops and lectures in for example group dynamics, workplace culture, ethics and Lean manufacturing (a popular strategy to improve efficiency in a production system). And of course we had massive amounts of Swedish fika! In the evenings we explored Gothenburg and played a lot of volleyball and Super Smash Bros.
Graduates and Phillip Holt after Lean workshop.
A lot of fun activities during and after the onboarding program days.
The second week was spent in Trollhättan and at our site here. We had tours on the shop floor, a lecture about the Swedish military jet engines that have been built on the site and tried the VR-experience VEGA, which was developed by the previous year’s trainees. The program ended by a fine dinner where we had the honor of meeting several SOMETHINGS, including CTO Russ Dun, who held a truly inspiring speech about the future of GKN Aerospace and sustainable development in the aerospace sector.
Graduates, HR-representatives and management at the dinner.
Now that the onboarding is over we are back on track with workshop practice, with the goal of getting to know the value streams of a few of the products we manufacture here in Trollhättan.
