Electroimpact, in cooperation with a large airframe manufacturer, has developed Automated Fiber Placement equipment capable of depositing material at speeds in excess of 2000 inches per minute. As the machine lays down each new ply of material, the area forward to machine motion is heated just in advance of pressing the tape against the substrate. A fast-reacting, high-power infrared emitter heats this area quickly and safely. The design of these heaters is the subject of this paper.
The Horizontal Automated Wing Drilling Equipment (HAWDE) machine is an enabling technology for automated drilling of large aircraft parts. HAWDE is a five axis drilling machine that operates over the upper and lower surfaces of eight wings, each more than 40 meters long and four stories tall. The machine accesses the entire A380 wing using a combination of elevators and a machine transporter that carries the machine from surface to surface. HAWDE drills holes in spars, butt splices, and rib feet in the wing box final assembly jigs for A380.
Kawasaki Heavy Industries (Nagoya, Japan) designs and builds the fuselage barrel section #43 of Boeing's 787 Dreamliner. The one-piece-barrel (OPB) fuselage design offered a new challenge to fastening equipment assembly cells. Using conventional methods, a fastening machine built around the roughly 6 meter diameter barrel would be very large, heavy, slow and inaccurate. The solution was to use Electroimpact's EMR technology on two smaller independent post machines with a reduced working envelope offering better speed, reliability and still maintaining the high accuracies required. Optimizing the working envelope and using EMR technology were pivotal factors in achieving the positioning accuracies required for a reliable fastening process that is maintainable in a production environment and increased access to fastener locations.
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