Aerospace Materials
“We’re scaling up each step of the process,” Wessels explained: “First it’s the fiber-coating, next is the tape- making process. Whereas at the GRC they had a small drum winder, we have a drum winder that’s ten times that size. And in the future we’ll be going to a continuous tape- making process, which gets us into more of what the PMC industry is doing now.
“On the layup portion too: at the Global Research Cen-
ter, they were using scissors and knives to cut and shape their plies. Here, we’re using a standard Gerber Technol- ogy cutter of the type used throughout the PMC industry and now in the CMC industry for the rapid cutting of these plies,” he noted.
“The burn-out process has scaled up significantly; the melt-infiltration process has scaled up significantly—all of those major processes have to be scaled up,” he said. But scaling up is not enough: they have been seeking ways to also improve the processes. “One we’re looking at right now is automation of portions of the layup,” Wessels
said. “The layup is a very manually intensive process at this point. It’s manually placing layer over layer, getting each to fit in the right direction. We use orientation markers and everything to assure the plies get in the right place, in the right order. But hand layup leaves room for inconsistencies and, more important to us, it’s a repetitive process, and people who do it are subject to ergonomic injury. That’s something we’re very cognizant of, and so we’re taking steps to automate certain parts of the process—the parts that are the primary causes of fatigue in the workers’ hands.”
“We’re scaling up each step of the process—first it’s the fiber-coating, next is the tape-making process.”
At GE, the microfactory, then, is what comes between the ‘eureka!’ moment and full production: “At the microfactory stage, we explore all of the limits, we discover the param- eters outside of which our parts become bad. We need to understand them, and narrow their range,” Wessels said, “so at Asheville, in that high-volume facility, they won’t have to vary it: they’ll know from our work here what the space is that they can operate in. That’s a great concept that we’ve really driven in GE Aviation, and it's one that we’re really proud of.” ME
Producing Production Equipment
an observation about GE Aviation’s process: they themselves make the equipment that makes the CMC material.
W
“Part of what makes the microfactory concept a success is that we are a fully-qualified source to make the production hardware,” he noted. “That means we have the quality system in place that enables us to ship the hardware that is used to make production engines out of. We’re making certification-compliant parts right now for the LEAP. “That’s a big deal. I think people in the R&D world sometimes have trouble understanding how hard it is to make production hardware as opposed to a development part here and there. These parts have to meet all of the extensive quality requirements associated with CMCs—and believe me, there are very rigorous quality requirements associated with this material and this hardware.”
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ManufacturingEngineeringMedia.com | February 2014
hen asked if GE Aviation has looked at any specific suppliers of automated tape-laying equipment for use in the Asheville CMC facility, Jeff Wessels’ answer is, “not yet,” along with
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