Technology for Auto and Aero

The aerospace industry is engaged in a global search to forge links in its supply chain that in some respects resembles the automotive industry's tier configuration.

The aerospace industry's appetite for outsourcing precision-engineered parts and assemblies is being fed by demand that is reflected in rapidly growing backlogs of commercial aircraft. For its part, the automotive industry has attempted to expand its global sourcing through standardization of processes and products. The world car must still be designed and manufactured, preferably locally, to account for regional differences and tastes from country to country.

The aerospace industry has been seeking answers to questions similar to those raised by the automotive industry of the 1970s and the 1980s, according to United Grinding Technologies Inc. (UGT; Miamisburg, OH). UGT believes the answers to the following questions will dramatically shape supply chain configurations in the future and the choice of manufacturing processes.

* How can aerospace look at the entire value stream, beginning to end, and understand how manufacturing and logistics systems are going to be engaged so that they align with marketing projections and customer expectations? How can aerospace move from batch manufacturing with thousands of parts in the pipeline, to small lot sizes, frequent changeover, specific delivery windows, and no tangible inventory?

The answers lie in shifting manufacturing to lean flexible configurations, for example, away from traditional manufacturing centers comprising grinding, EDM, and milling departments to product cells that may include discrete processes, but where the objective is to manufacture a product complete without leaving the loop or cell.

The solution is different today. Machine capacity is not necessarily created to grind or mill thousands of parts as fast as possible to sit in long queues awaiting further processing. Processing parts simply for inventory is waste.

It's the same thinking that motivated The Boeing Co. (Chicago) to initiate and implement a lean manufacturing program for its project to build the airplane wings and aft fuselage for the US Air Force's next-generation F/A 22 Raptor fighter/attack aircraft. Key to Boeing's lean effort on the Raptor program was reducing, or even eliminating, the aircraft maker's huge monument tooling, the extremely large fixtures or jigs used to build large aero structures like airplane wings that typically require hundreds of costly time-consuming crane moves.

The pace of transition to lean processing is all the more critical for the automotive industry. The cost of idling a transmission line due to process malfunction can be as high as $250,000 a minute, says UGT. Just as bad, although less visible, are product failures that raise warranty costs and the need for in-field replacements. The company says that manufacturers have to look up and down the automotive production line to find opportunities to combine processes like cleaning, polishing, and deburring matched to the level of operator skills and space limitations.

The commercial aircraft industry, defense aerospace sector, and general aviation are dealing with many of the issues that automotive manufacturers have faced in the last decade. The following are some areas that continue to be of interest to both:

* Lightweighting components is a critical consideration for both automotive and aerospace for one and the same reason: fuel efficiency in the face of spiking fuel costs and mandated by the government in the case of the auto industry. Lighter, stronger materials like aluminum, composites, titanium, and nickel-based alloys challenge machining.

* Automation in assembly has been a hallmark of the automotive industry, but more flexibility is being sought through use of machining centers and robots, especially at the tier level. Aerospace OEMs who produce markedly fewer completed units must find automation in drilling holes (literally by the tens and hundreds of thousands) and developing automated systems that can handle monumentally large structural components.

* Both automotive and aerospace have critical quality requirements that demand advanced measurement and inspection techniques. Shop-floor systems are making inroads in automotive plants; while the sheer size of aircraft structures challenges technological innovation in laser and radar-powered devices, as well as more traditional CMMs and hand-held versions.