Aerobloggen

Hello everyone!

It’s time for an update from my abroad placement in Bristol, UK.

I’m at one of GKNs two manufacturing sites in Bristol, in addition to these two sites GKN also have a brand new Global technology center. The site where I’m at is part of the Civil Airframe business line and they manufacture products to the wings of the aircraft, unlike the site in Trollhättan which manufactures parts to the engine. The main products that’s produced here are Fixed Trailing Edge (FTE) to the Airbus A350 aircraft which is a long distance aircraft with a wide aisle. If you would travel from London to New York it’s likely that you will get the honor to board this aircraft.

The FTE are made out of carbon using Advanced Fibre Placement, it’s over 30 meters long and is made out of 3 shorter spars which are automatically assembled to the full FTE. The assembly process itself is the most complex automated large scale assembly undertaken by GKN. The total weight of the entire FTE is 1800 kg which corresponds to about 7% of the wings weight and it supports 10x its own weight. It runs from the fuselage all the way to the end of the wing. Below is a picture of the assembled FTE and a drawing to show where on the wing it’s placed. As I mentioned, the FTE carries a lot of weight but it has other functionalities as well. For example it’s used for attaching the landing gear onto the wing.

What about living in Bristol? Bristol is located on the west coast of England, about a 2 hour drive from London. It even has its own airport, which is very convenient. I flew to Paris a few weeks ago with a direct flight to Charles de Gauelle, and it took just about 1 hour. The city is filled with great pubs and restaurants and there’s also a lot of shopping and plenty of parks and green areas. The pictures below is from one of the biggest parks in town and a panorama view of the town from above.

So, Bristol is close to London but I’m even happier about the fact that it’s close to Wales. If you are into old castles, fortresses, cathedrals etc. then Wales is the place to be. It has more castles than any other area in Europe (might have found a somewhat biased source for that but anyways). Apart from the castles the countryside in Wales is absolutely beautiful. I tried to find a few pictures to show you what it looks like but as you know, it’s never the same in a picture as it is in reality. All pictures are from Wales, the top left one is from Little Haven on the southwest coast, top right is the St.Davids Cathedral in St.Davids. Bottom left is from Conwy castle on the north coast and bottom right is from Brecon Beacons National Park.

That was all from me, take care!

/Emma

Around 3 months ago I packed my bags and stepped on a plane with the final destination being the Netherlands. This was a bit unfortunate timing as the country was in the midst of a covid lockdown making it difficult to settle in at first. Luckily IKEA opened up a few days later making it possible to collect all the necessities of being a “swede”.

Ever since my arrival I have had the great opportunity of joining the Lean deployment team at GKN’s defense site located in Hoogeveen. Upon joining I was a bit worried that the language barrier would be an obstacle. As it turned out I have more of an issue with the food culture of eating sandwiches to lunch every day than with the language, which says a lot about how well they speak English in this country. Anyway, my role within the Lean deployment team is an interim site six sigma black belt which constitutes a few different responsibilities. For instance, I am running an improvement project targeting reduction of non-conformances for one of our “high movers” for the military fighter jet F-35 Lightning II. Another part is to make sure we are running our six sigma program for the benefit of the site, meaning that we target the most critical issues and the ones who can bring us financial savings and cost of poor quality (COPQ) reduction. Based on GKNs global target of putting much emphasis on reducing COPQ I believe working with Lean six sigma is one of the most influential areas at this point in time, which really drives my motivation.  

Having this possibility of working abroad is one of many great parts with GKN’s graduate program. Besides learning more about handling all the tough situations related to moving to another country I also got first-hand experience working with many cool new products in the defense business line, e.g., wing flaps and inflight opening doors. As these products include a great deal of composites, they require very different manufacturing processes than what I am used to in Sweden, making the new learnings and perspectives very valuable.

As of for now, I am going to enjoy the last couple of weeks here in the Netherlands to see if we can take a few more steps toward making Lean fly. After that, it is time for some vacation and then I will see you all back in Sweden.

Take care everyone!

The 27th of april was the last fair for the season, LARV (Luleå ArbetsmarknadsVecka) in Luleå. The trainee fighters sent to visit Norrbottens pearl, Luleå, were Merim and Alex together with two HR representatives and two managers. It was awesome to get the chance to talk with students about aerospace and our role within the business, we hope that some of you we meet have found their way to this blog.

The journey started at 03.30 on Tuesday from Trollhättan to Landvetter and then on to Luleå, with a transit in Arlanda Stockholm. The arrival to Luleå hosted fresh winds and snow covered lawns, what could be better than this to build your character. As a previous LTU-student, I (Alex) had to act as a local and guide the team around campus prior to us setting up our stall. After a lot of dividing and adding, we could happily agree on that setting up a Samsung-TV on a portable wall is a lot harder than designing and constructing jet engines… Towards the evening we went in to town and grabbed a couple of beers and had something to eat at the newly established Corners Sportsbar. On Wednesday the fair happened and it was overshadowed by all the coffee we drank. It was really fun that our 3D-printed rocket got us much attention which enabled us to talk about other stuff we do except the Ariane rocket nozzle. There were a lot of interesting, engaging and nice talks with students about materials, manufacturing and the future of the business. We just want to say thank you to everyone that visited us during LARV.

For me (Merim) it was my first time in Luleå, I have previously never been further north than Stockholm, and I can happily say that it was a really nice experience to visit, as Alex refers to it, Norrbottens pearl. It was everything I expected and more, frozen lakes and ocean, a bit of snow that has not yet melted and cold winds. I can though imagine that we were a bit lucky as we visited Luleå during the “right” half year so we did not get the vitamin D deficiency.

After the fair me and Alex attended the banquet which was arranged by LARV. They indulged us in a fantastic lobster soup followed by salmon and some kind of potato bun, and lastly some cheesecake, very good food. We also got the try out beer from Luleås own brewery which was a cool experience.

To summarize my first visit to Luleå I would say ten out of ten would do it again!

Thesis work

As a trainee you can help out to manage all the thesis works at the company as most of them eventually end up at our table and we post them on the trainee blog. Sometimes it happens that we hear something about a thesis that is not yet posted, which is why it is good for you as a student to contact us as we might have more in storage than what you see on the blog, however this is not guaranteed. In worst case, we will just make a note of your interest and area and we’ll reach out to you when something interesting comes up.

As I mentioned earlier, we publish all our thesis work on this site so take a look to see if you find anything interesting. We usually publish new work during autumn which is scheduled to start in spring, so the posted documents might be outdated and some of them might already have started. However, you can always contact the contact person to double check, maybe there will be a continuation on the current thesis work.

Open to work?

We also got the chance to talk to you about how it is to work for GKN Aerospace and what opportunities there are right now. I would encourage you to take a look at our career page, which you can find HERE, take a look and apply for any position that looks interesting!

It’s with mixed feelings I look out the window and see that it snows horizontally in Trollhättan right now, at least it’s not pitch black when you leave the office anymore… The past month rushed by with development week, recruitment of 2022 graduates and last week I had the opportunity to tag along my new department for a week of meetings at two of our US sites.

At the moment, I’m doing my third rotating at Supply Chain Engines, a global department who supports all Engines-sites across the globe, where I will work on further developing internal communications and knowledge sharing. As part of this project, I was invited to join the department for a gathering at our site in Newington to discuss Supply Chain and Procurement for three days.

The journey started in a turboprop plane to Copenhagen before boarding the A350-900 to Newark Liberty International Airport. The latter is propelled by the two Trent XWB engines where we manufacture the Intermediate Compressor Case at our site in Trollhättan.

Once in place, the meetings were held in Newington at our Engines site that manufactures large Fan cases to GE90 and IMC to the smaller of the GTF engines, 24k. The frist day we talked about the expectations of the team, targets and inventory management. One of the lesser expected learnings were that Americans serve their coffee in boxes and if you expect seven Swedes to be present, one of those boxes will not be enough to get through the day.

During day two, we talked about engagement, communications and knowledge sharing. Together with my current manager I conducted a workshop regarding how the department wants to communicate, what meetings that should be held continuously and how they can be more effective.

Last day was spent talking about new Aerospace standards and how they affect and ease our daily work before the afternoon was free to meet each other and discuss common issues before going home.

Before going home on Friday we visited our site in Manchester. It was great to see their workshop since it differs quite a lot from what we do in Trollhättan. In Manchester, they focus on manufacturing blades for the engines fan and compressor. For some programs, the process is quite similar to how we work in Trollhättan, a large forging that looks similar to the end product which is then processed to finished goods. However, they also produce really small compressor blades that is no more than 15cm long and is milled out of a block of aluminum. If you weren’t aware of the end product, you would have no clue what the raw material was supposed to become.

After the tour we headed back to Newark for the plane back home and the weekend. A short but intense trip to the US.

Interested in Aerospace? Right now we have a lot of interesting jobs on the GKN Aerospace career page, go have a look!

/Alex

Hello!

Last Friday, Emelie and I arranged a digital event for young girls and non-binaries between the ages of 13-19, with the goal of inspiring them to pursue a career in technology. The event is called IGE-day, Introduce a Girl to Engineering day, and is a concept created by the Womengineer Foundation. Womengineer has a vision that by 2030, the number of graduating engineers will be the same for both men and women. At GKN Aerospace, we work actively to increase the diversity of the company, and participating in events like these is very important to us. Because of this, we have participated in IGEday several years in a row.

As mentioned earlier, this year it was time for Emelie and I to arrange the event at GAS. Given the high spread of the Coronavirus at the beginning of the year, the event was decided to be held digitally, which went very well. We invited Johanna Nylander who presented the actions of the aviation industry to achieve a sustainable flight. Additionally, Elin Eriksson and Emily Chen told us about their journey and described what they do in a normal workday as engineers. Thank you for being a part of the event!

Because the event was digital, we chose to send out goodie bags to the participants, something that was very much appreciated. We hope that the participants had a good day and that they learned more about engineering, and possibly got an answer to the eternal question “What does an engineer do?”.

//Moa

Hello again all readers!

We are now back in Västra Götaland after an intense week in Bristol, UK. Finally, we had the opportunity to meet the other global graduates in real life and not behind a screen. What a fun week we had. A group of 16 people, 5 from the USA, 3 from the Netherlands, 3 from the UK and of course 5 from Sweden, stormed the streets of Bristol.

The days consisted of several training sessions that touched on various topics, including self-awareness, communication skills, change management, self-confidence and setting goals. This gave life to many exciting discussions. We also had the opportunity to visit the new GTC, which opened in October, as well as our site in Filton and Western Approach.

The afternoons and evenings were also packed with many fun activities. We visited Bristol’s famous Clifton Suspension Bridge. A beautiful view that was difficult to enjoy when your heart rate was at 120 bpm after a car ride in the hectic English left-hand traffic.

We were also Locked in a Room and had dinner on a boat.

To finish the week off, we were invited to the Recognition of Learning Event. At the event, the 2019 cohort graduated and other awards were handed out. This event took place at the Aerospace Museum in Bristol where we had dinner under the wings of the Concorde aircraft. An amazing experience.

Thank you to everyone who participated during the week and a big thank you to Charlie Lean who arranged it all. We now face the challenge of applying what we have learned and we look forward to the next Development Week.

Hi all,

I have during my latest rotation been at the same department as Emelie, but my task has been out of a different sort where I have focused on Additive Manufacturing (AM).

I have gotten the chance to meet many experts within the field of AM at the company and it has been really rewarding with interesting discussions. Well, discussion is maybe farfetched as I had to spend my full focus on taking notes as I am a rookie within the field of AM. But nevertheless I am really grateful for all the inputs and insights that I have received around the topic of additive manufacturing. I got a whole new view of it in a way that is not possible by reading a book.

Anyhow, some of you might wonder what additive manufacturing is, (pause for suspense) I will tell you. Ordinary manufacturing methods usually involves a subtractive method, which means that you have a big piece of metal that you turn and mill until it gets the form that you desire. Usually a lot of material is used up in the process (removed) which puts a high load on the environment, a load one preferably would eliminate! But nevertheless this method has been the traditional method to use as other options are scarce. This changed when additive manufacturing was introduced to the market, which is the opposite of subtractive manufacturing.

Additive manufacturing works by deposition of layer-by-layer until the desired part has been constructed, which you specify with the help of 3D-CAD. Today, you can perform the manufacturing of parts in some different ways and there exists seven different technologies to perform additive manufacturing. You can construct parts in plastic as well as in metal, however metal manufacturing is still energy intense which is unavoidable. In metal AM there are several different ways in which the material can be added to the manufacturing process, you can do it either with wire or powder. When using wire, you need to add the material locally to the build, where a laser is melting the tip of the wire. Using powder you get two options. You can add it locally just as in wire manufacturing, a nozzle deposits the material locally and a laser then melts the powder in place. You can also use a bed of powder where a laser, or another energy source, then sweeps the bed where the part is to be built and a component emerges towards the end. The part is then build “within” the bed itself. Whichever way you do it, some post-processing is required to achieve the desired finish.

Innovation and technology has always been the forefront at GKN Aerospace where we as a company always strive to attain knowledge and experience within different fields. This enables us to tailor-design a manufacturing process for our product portfolio. For example, we have a goal to construct our space components with the help of AM, which will usher our portfolio into the next generation. If you want to read more about our AM capabilities and goals, you can follow this LINK.