REPORT - LIEBHERR-AEROSPACE TOULOUSE SAS
Big precision for big workpieces The air-conditioning of the cabin is very important for safety and comfort on board an aircraft. In order to ensure an optimal cabin climate, Liebherr-Aerospace Toulouse SAS develops, produces, distributes and maintains air-management systems for aviation. As a system producer among the world’s market leaders, the company is available with help and advice for the projects of its customers, which include fixed-wing aircraft and helicopter producers, as well as airlines. Certain workpieces that are manufactured in Campsas, the production plant of Liebherr-Aerospace Toulouse SAS, are very big. To be able to load them into a DMC 100 U 5-axis milling center, Liebherr has acquired an EROWA Robot Dynamic 500. Production Manager Bernard Bonis explains why. EROWA: Monsieur Bonis, what kind of workpieces do you machine? Bernard Bonis: Basically they’re cast aluminum parts for the air-management systems of the Airbus types A320 and A380. They’re very big and have complicated and unbalanced shapes. Depending on the size of the workpieces, we fit them to fixtures on EROWA UPC pallets 320x320mm and on MTS pallets 700x700mm.
Previously, we manufactured the parts on two 4-axis machine tools. Now we work in mixed production on one single 5-axis production cell. The new machine is more flexible and faster and offers high precision combined with a larger working space. Such a production machine is intended to ensure optimal production in automated operation. And for what reasons did you opt for EROWA? We have been using various workpiece palletizing systems from EROWA for years: UPC and PC210. Now the MTS tooling system for bigger parts has been added. All these systems provide a very high and constant repeatability with very short set-up times.
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