Aerobloggen

Hello world!

 

A full year has passed since I started here as a graduate engineer. It’s gone by so incredibly fast. It is now less than a month until I leave Trollhättan for half a year. Leaving feels a bit melancholy, but I look forward to the following six months a lot! During these coming time I will be working at Fokker Services in Hoofddorp, right outside Amsterdam. According to their HR department I will be the first person from GKN to be stationed there for work, which feels exciting. Fokker also have their own graduate program and I’ve been told they are considering sending a graduate for placement here in Sweden as a response.

I risk sounding like a broken record – but I really look forward to these coming six months so much. I’m very hopeful at the moment about the whole thing and I can’t wait to get going. There was a time when I was a bit stressed out about finding accommodation, but I have now booked the a place for the first few weeks and the rest I can handle when I’m actually there.

The place I’ve booked is called The Student Hotel and is situated about a kilometer west of the city center. I’m glad I found something so central, which means my free time will be much closer to the buzz. The Student Hotel is partly an apartment hotel, but also a regular hotel and like the name suggests it also hosts student apartments. It has a few common areas with ping pong and pool tables and I think I might quickly find a few friends there which I’m hopeful about.

Anyways I’m very excited to soon be going and as you notice I’m looking forward a lot to the whole ordeal. From all the experience and new things I will learn at work, the experience of living in another country and all the new friends I will meet. This will be six great months!

 

Over and out!

Joakim

 

ps This year has been so much fun and I’ve been having a great time. The place I liked the most was my home department, where I will be working indefinitely when I get back to Sweden. Looking forward to this so much as well! J ds

Dear blog,

It’s been a while, it’s time for another entry. This will be an entry about our visit to GKN Sinter Metals in Germany! As you dedicated readers know, we graduates were on a trip to Germany a while back. Like all the other weeks we’ve travelled, this week too was magical. Apart from fun and interesting study visits, the weather was also perfect – early summer, blazing sun and lots of heat.

Most of our visits on these trips are aerospace related as we ourselves work within aerospace. However, we sometimes choose to visit companies working with other things for various reasons. An example is that we visited Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, which has 70000 (no, not 7000) employees just on this site! Another example was visiting GKN Driveline in Birmingham, to see more of our own business but in a bigger perspective than just the aerospace division.

This time it was time to broaden our horizon and visit GKN Sinter Metals in Bad Langensalza, Germany. Sintering is a manufacturing process where fine metal powder is formed, pressurized and heated until it becomes a solid object. In classical sintering just the metal powder is used for manufacturing of these parts. This means the structure is very sensitive after forming but before sintering. Even touching it can destroy it. However, at GKN Sinter Metals in Bad Langensalza they use a special technique of sintering called MIM – Metal Injection Molding. MIM means mixing the metal powder with plastic beads which is knead into a tight mix of the two ingredients. This is then injected into a formation shell where heat is applied until the plastic melts, creating a solid object. This makes the object much less sensitive than if there was no plastic. The part is then moved to the sintering process where more heat removes the plastic and shrinks the part by about 20% in size. Lastly the remaining material is sintered and the product is finished. If one wishes to perform after-treatment such as chucking or milling that is absolutely no problem.

Some applications where MIM-products are used include common car engines, gear boxes, details in weaponry, locking mechanisms, sensors, and other small delicate metal items. The size of the details produced is from just a few millimeters up to a couple of centimeters. The larger the object the less reliable is the process of MIM.

All in all this was one of our most interesting and fun visits, at least according to me. These visits unrelated to aerospace is very inspiring as one often gets to see products, methods, work forms and more that one didn’t even know existed. Another benefit of being a graduate engineer!

 

Over and out,

Joakim

Good day readers!

As you regular readers know we graduate engineers sometimes conduct study visits to companies of interest to us. In part during our activity weeks, where we travel for a whole week, but we also go on day trips to companies located closer to home. Last week we had the pleasure of visiting Arcam in Mölndal and Ruag Space in Gothenburg. Lots of fun!

Arcam is a world leading company in additive manufacturing (AM). A more common term of AM is 3D-printing. This is a modern technology which is a very hot topic within aerospace engineering today and which will likely change the foundation of classic production methods such as milling and chucking. An important reason why AM is such a hot topic for the aerospace business is that it will allow for the production of much more complex geometries than is allowed by classic production methods. By opening this door a lot of weight in an airplane can be saved and saving weight of flying products infers a possibility of making a lot of money.

At Arcam we were given a presentation of what types of AM methods exist today, which of these Arcam focuses on and what possibilities AM brings. We also had a tour of Arcams production and assembling of new AM machines.

Ruag in turn is a company which develops and manufactures electrical components for use in the space industry. Among other things they make the guidance computers for the Ariane 5 – the ESA heavy lift rocket – and circuit boards for satellites. In contrast with Arcams visionary technologies Ruag is a company which uses very experienced and proven technology. As the cost of an Ariane 5 launch is hundreds of millions of dollars Ruag is a company where quality is a strong focus. Strong computational power is therefore not a focus of these products. If a personal computer crashes there will likely not be any big consequences but if a guidance computer to Ariane 5 would crash during a launch this would lead to very big consequences.

Apart from a presentation of Ruags products and business we also had a tour of their facility in Gothenburg where we were shown their production, their clean room and their vibration test centre among other things. As usual we had a very interesting and fun time conducting these study visits. Now we look forward until next week when we will visit a few companies in Germany!

 

Over and out

Joakim Åhman

Hello readers,

This will probably be my last blog post of this placement here in Sweden, and so in this post I want to reflect a little on my placement here. What have my greatest challenges been in this placement, and what have I learnt?

My greatest challenge here has been to learn a large amount of technical information in a very short period of time. During this placement I’ve had to learn:

• How to write (or at least read and understand) scripts written in Python, Matlab, Perl, Batch and Bash programming languages
• The fundamentals of CFD and how to use CFX to analyse turbines
• Automating design analysis using multi objective design optimization software like ModeFrontier and OptiSLang
• Some fundamental physics and aerodynamics relating to turbines

with little to no training and by learning on the job. This has felt overwhelming at times but I think that the ability to remain calm and learn quickly in unfamiliar territory is a very useful skill to develop. I have learnt that the way to overcome these challenges is to remain calm and to believe in your ability, even when the knowledge gap seems huge. It is also important to identify when to seek help, and who the key people are that can provide that help.

Another challenge in this placement has been to define and truly understand the scope of some of my objectives. A previous manager and mentor once told me:

“The hardest part of solving any problem in engineering, is in defining the problem accurately.”

Constantly ask yourself: what are we trying to achieve? Is this project or objective defined in a way that has a clear goal? It’s amazing how often we find ourselves half way through a project only to reflect that the way that we initially defined the problem was too vague, or was incorrect, or was based on the wrong information, or was misunderstood by some of the people involved.

I have learnt that the solution to this problem is communication. I am still working on improving in this area, but I have made good progress by constantly listening and responding to my project customer. If you (or even they) have not accurately defined the problem, you will never be able to find a satisfactory solution. Don’t be afraid to redefine a problem in a better way even halfway through a project – it is not “going back to the start”, its real progress that will lead to a better outcome.

I hope that my experience with these challenges and the learning that has come from them is useful to you. I am looking forward to a whole host of new challenges in my next placement, and trying to figure out how to overcome those too!

As a final note, I want to say thank you to everyone here in Trollhättan that has made me feel so welcome over the last 6 months. It has been a great pleasure for me to work with you all and I will truly be sad to leave.

Neil Irwin

Greetings readers!

This week is the third week of our third departments as trainees. I am now stationed at the commercial military department. When I mention this to friends it is common for them to think I’m working with commercials, which is not the case. At the commercial department we work with business, customer relations, contracts, strategy and so on.

The assignment I have been given is a piece of the puzzle for ground work of the long term strategy of the company. So far it’s been very interesting. It took me a while before I understood what it was I was actually supposed to do. Then it took me a while more before I received the necessary materials to start working on it. Now I’ve started, and I already have some (very) preliminary results to show, which the management found very interesting. So even if I can’t tell you much more at the moment it feels like I’m on the right track and it feels good to have gotten started in this new department.

As a relatively new employee at this company I feel it’s hard to determine what I’m allowed to speak about, especially when working in the military parts of the organization. This is why the answers to questions about what I do at work (and this blog post) sometimes becomes quite cryptic. I hope this gets better with time and that I will have a better understanding about what I’m allowed to say and not. For now I’ll have to just use cryptic answers or not answer at all. The main thing to take away is anyway that the new department feels good and it feels like I’m doing something useful with my time here so far.

Over and out,

Joakim Åhman

Ps Today we trainees has been on a visit to Skaraborgs Flygflottilj (Swedish air force base), F7. Very exciting! Extra exciting for me I think, as my home department is within the military organization here at GKN. There will be a blog entry about this tomorrow or early next week. ds

Hello world!

I was thinking I should write a blog entry about the lectures that we’ve held for the ninth graders of Trollhättan during January. As we’ve mentioned before on this blog, each year the graduate engineers has a specific assignment. This year the purpose of that assignment is to increase the number of applications to the ITU-program, a high school program which is held in part here at GKN in Trollhättan. The ninth graders are currently choosing which high school they will go to so as a part of our project we’ve been visiting the schools of Trollhättan. During these lectures we have been trying to inspire the youth to choose a path towards a profession in engineering or technology. A great start on such a path is the ITU-program.

There has been groups of students who are very interested in what we have to say. These people are already considering studying to become engineers when they are grown up and this is very nice to see. There are of course also students who are completely uninterested in engineering and technology. These students are very hard to reach and to sway. However, there is also a group which is un-sure of what they would like to do. Some of these people show some interest and it is that group of people which we are trying to reach out to and inspire. We want to help them become more confident in trying out a path towards working with some kind of technology, for example engineering. We want them to apply to the ITU-program, which is a great start on such a path.

Yesterday a colleague pointed out that the statistics concerning the applications can be followed live and that you thereby can see how many has applied to the ITU program. One can then compare that number to that of the same period last year. The number of applications is currently doubled compared to last year. It pleases me to see that what we have done is reaching through to the youths and to know that we’ve succeeded in inspiring quite a lot of them to enter a path towards working with technology. We hope the number of applications will continue on the forecast that the number will be doubled. If the total number will be doubled compared to previous years we can be really proud of what we have accomplished!

 

Over and out

Joakim

Last Tuesday we Graduate Engineers had the great pleasure of visiting ESTEC, ESA’s largest facility and the heart of their research and technology, situated in Noordwijk, The Netherlands. For those who doesn’t know, ESA is an abbreviation of European Space Agency and is the european equivalent of NASA. We arrived around lunch and was greeted by a few of their Graduate Engineers, with whom we had lunch. After lunch we had a lecture about the history and missions of ESA, followed by a lecture about their technology and developments considering Additive Manufacturing (AM), which is 3D-printing in metal, which is currently a super hot topic in aerospace and space industry. Apart from 3D-printing in metal, ESA are also conducting research on 3D-printing in materials found on the moon. If this can be made to work, ESA could send 3D-printers to the moon to 3D-print a lunar base. This way, the building materials would not have to be freighted from Earth.

After this extremely exciting and inspiring lecture, we received a quick visit by none other than Mr Franco Ongaro, ESAs Director of TEC. Even if he was quite a busy man and the encounter was quite short it was inspiring to get to meet him.

The day continued with a privileged tour around the facility, including among other things:

• Their CDF (Concurrent Design Facility), which is a sort of meeting room designed for lengthy meetings including lots of different experts, with the purpose of relatively quickly reach some conclusions on what the practical possibilities of different projects might be.
• Their testing facility. Here ESA conducts for example vibration testing, to make sure the developed equipment can withstand the strong vibrations encountered during lift-off. Another example is space simulation, where a satellite prototype is put in vacuum and exposed to extreme temperatures for weeks at a time to make sure the equipment operates as intended in space.

All in all the visit took somewhere between five and six hours. There is not so many times in my life that I’ve experienced something so inspiring as this visit. However after such a long visit with so much information, we all felt quite tired when we finished up.

Thank you very much for having us, ESTEC!

 

Over and out

/Joakim Åhman

Good day blog-readers!

The time on our first work placements is soon over. It’s just one week left until we change placements to our new departments. My new department will be procurement, with a focus on R&T (Research and Technology). Currently I know very little about procurement and economics, but I look forward to learning about it. As I don’t have much knowledge of the subject the plan is for me to act as a shadow to an procurement leader. I suspect I will be a “fly on the wall” (is that an expression in English?) in meetings etc.

I start at procurement the 19^th of December, but I have already made a surreptitious start. The other day I was invited by Anders Wikman (the procurement leader whom I will follow) to a meeting with a potential future supplier. Who am I to decline, I thought, and so I joined in. So yesterday we went on a day trip to meet the company. As described above, my knowledge of procurement is very limited and it was hard for me to know what I should look for in this supplier. Nevertheless I was brought into the conversation and apart from the experience being very interesting and fun, I also feel like a learnt a few things. I hope more supplier meetings will follow. I am a bit tense but also very stoked about my upcoming time at procurement!

Over and out

Joakim

It’s been a while since we started here at GKN, and we graduate engineers have spent a few weeks at our respective home departments. At my department, which is military engines performance, we work with the performance of entire engine systems. The engine which is mainly considered is the RM12 engine – the engine powering the Gripen fighter jet, but we also work with other engines. I have personally not begun working with the RM12 engine and I probably won’t until I return from my time abroad, so by spring 2018.

The first time at the department consisted of a lot of reading up and learning about the basics of engine performance, but since a few weeks I have started working on more sharp tasks. Right now I work with a future engine. This engine is derived from an already existing jet engine. We work with a requirement specification of what this future engine must be able to handle in terms of for example thrust force and fuel consumption. We look at whether the requirements are attainable with todays technology and also how the performance of said engine might be a few years from now if materials and more keep developing in a rate similar to that of the past. My part so far has been to try to analyze the performance of the engine using this extrapolated future technology.

I’ve enjoyed this first time at the department a lot. Apart from my mentors and other colleagues being very including and pedagogical, they are also fun as individuals. Because of this it feels a bit melancholy, in a way, that I will be away for more than a year during the period as a graduate engineer. But on the other hand – what a year it will be!

Greetings everybody! It’s time for my (Joakim Åhman) first blog entry! My home department will be Engine Systems Performance in the military sector here at GKN. I’ve been at this department for a few weeks and so far I really like it here. More on this in an upcoming blog entry.

A few weeks ago was the first graduate engineer theme week for us. During the year we will have four of these weeks, during which we will be conducting study visits and doing team building exercises and more. During the first week we visited ACAB in Linköping and SAS in Stockholm. You can read more about these visits in a earlier blog entry from my colleague Emelie Roslund. We also made an interesting and inspiring visit to the Swedish air force museum in Linköping. There was a lot of interesting airplanes to behold, from the early 1900s to more modern fighter jets, such as the legendary JAS 39 Gripen (Gryphon).

JAS (or Gripen) is a name which rings a bell in the ears of most Swedish people. The letters in JAS stands for Jakt, Attack and Spaning. Translated into English this means Hunt (the actual English term is “Fighter”), Attack and Reconnaissance. A fighter is an aircraft designed to destroy other aircrafts. An attack aircraft is an aircraft designed to act as air support for ground troops, with more precision than common bomber aircrafts. A reconnaissance aircraft is an aircraft which carries surveillance intruments in order to carry out aerial reconnaissance. JAS 39 Gripen is, as the name suggests, an aircraft designed to be able to carry out all of these tasks. GKN Aerospace Engine Systems owns and has the responsibility of RM12, which is the engine powering the Gripen aircraft. As you might have guessed, my home department at GKN is very involved in service and developing of the RM12, which makes the Gripen aircraft a more interesting aircraft for me personally.

Other personal favorits to behold at the museum was among others:

• SAAB 37 Viggen (Thunderbolt) – An earlier swedish fighter jet, in service the years 1972-2007.
• SAAB 35 Draken (Dragon or Kite) – The first Swedish fighter jet using a delta wing.
• P-51 Mustang – A legendary fighter aircraft developed and used by the Americans during the second world war.

If you ever go to Linköping then I highly recommend a visit to the air force museum!