Industry Focus – Aerospace

INDUSTRY FOCUS - AEROSPACE

How organisations in the sectorCAN capitalise on Industry 4.0

Is Aerospace ready to capitalise on Industry 4.0?

Aerospace was identified as one of the sectors with most to gain from Industry 4.0 and its associated technologies. Industry 4.0 magazine takes a look at how organisations in the sector can capitalise on these opportunities.

The UK Government’s Made Smarter review identified a £17.5 billion opportunity for the aerospace sector over the next ten years through the adoption of currently known digital technologies.

The report’s authors stated: “Of all the sectors we examined, aerospace offers the greatest potential in terms of both cost reduction and new business models.”

How can the sector achieve this potential?

According to Sameer Savani, Head of Innovation & Engineering at ADS, the biggest quick win for aerospace when it comes to implementing Industry 4.0 is simply to get started on any part of the journey.

“Getting started with Industry 4.0 isn’t about individual technologies or lengthy planning; rather it takes experimentation and simply getting to be more comfortable with what is possible,”

“Getting started with Industry 4.0 isn’t about individual technologies or lengthy planning; rather it takes experimentation and simply getting to be more comfortable with what is possible,”

Sameer Savani, Head of Innovation & Engineering at ADS

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INDUSTRY FOCUS - AEROSPACE

Issue no 3 - AUGUST 2018 industry 4.0

Getting Started

Companies within the aerospace sector share similar innovation drivers: to increase the rate of production as demand from the global aerospace sector grows; to drive down costs; to add value to products and services; and to protect and improve quality.

But while the sector might share objectives, individual starting points across the sector are very different – meaning the Industry 4.0 journeys that companies will find themselves making will be very bespoke.

“By asking where you want to create value and understanding where you are starting from in terms of digitalisation, you can find the two end points of your journey,” says Savani.

He insists there are a lot of quick wins. For example, integrating low-cost sensors and off-the-shelf data visualisation and analytics can be a good introduction to understanding what data can do and how it can be converted into actionable information – and can start to deliver real benefits quite quickly.

Even something as simple as installing sensors so that a product can be measured while it is being machined, rather than when it comes off the machine, can have a significant impact in time and cost savings.

Measurement is key in order to understand the ROI you’re getting from any improvements, says Savani. The ability to quickly respond to the actionable information derived from data will be a decisive success factor in any Industry 4.0 initiative.

“By asking where you want to create value and understanding where you are starting from in terms of digitalisation, you can find the two end points of your journey,”

Video:

Aerospace 4.0 – Factories of the Future

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Experimenting with New Ideas

Even for tier one manufacturers with wellestablished data analytics capabilities, Industry 4.0 is delivering some quick wins. At this year’s Industry 4.0 Summit in Manchester, the hackathon run by Digital Catapult featured a challenge laid down by Rolls Royce to look for innovative solutions that tackled the issue of low yield from a highly complex manufacturing process.

“Hack and Pitch is a very easy format for us which effectively is concentrated horizon scanning. For us, the data analytics bar is set quite high anyway. Even so, some ideas which emerged here are very interesting. After 50 or 60 years of manufacturing in this way, the winner has suggested we intervene in a lowimpact way to acquire some more data and that may help us to solve the problem we set – he has opened our eyes to something we weren’t expecting.”

Nigel Jackson, Programme Manager at R2 Data Labs

Nigel Jackson, Programme Manager at R2 Data Labs, a new Rolls Royce initiative organised to sprint at solutions and quickly solve problems across design, manufacturing and after-market service, was impressed by the willingness of SMBs to engage with the challenge.

“Hack and Pitch is a very easy format for us which effectively is concentrated horizon scanning,” Jackson explains. “For us, the data analytics bar is set quite high anyway. Even so, some ideas which emerged here are very interesting. After 50 or 60 years of manufacturing in this way, the winner has suggested we intervene in a low-impact way to acquire some more data and that may help us to solve the problem we set – he has opened our eyes to something we weren’t expecting.”

Video:

Aerospace 4.0 at The Farnborough Airshow

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A New Mindset

Once businesses have found this mindset of “try, test and adapt” a whole world of new possibilities open up for them, says Savani. The key is to quickly drop what doesn’t work and focus on scaling up what does work. Making this decision comes back to data; information empowers you to act quickly.

This agility does not naturally fit well with the complexity, extended product lifecycles and traditionally rigid supply chains of the aerospace sector, but some companies are innovating around ways to build more agility into their processes.

Kostas Efthymiou outlined such an initiative, led by engineering firm Meggitt, at this year’s Industry 4.0 Summit. Meggitt’s Modular Modifiable Manufacturing (M4) project seeks to build additional flexibility into the firm’s manufacturing processes.

The project got the green light following the success of an earlier, small-scale project at Meggitt to create intelligent workplaces that could guide operators through process steps. Early success here led to the initiation of the larger scale M4 project.

“The project hasn’t been linear; when we started the project we had a basic understanding of the tech we wanted to use, but we weren’t 100 percent sure. After three years, we have made a lot of decisions and changed our ideas about the tech we finally implemented,”

Kostas Efthymiou, Technical Architect for Meggitt PLC

Efthymiou’s experience of the project clearly illustrates the need for flexibility and good data to ensure the success of such an initiative: “The project hasn’t been linear; when we started the project we had a basic understanding of the tech we wanted to use, but we weren’t 100 percent sure. After three years, we have made a lot of decisions and changed our ideas about the tech we finally implemented,” Efthymiou explains.

By designing the work so that they could keep their options open, the M4 project team were able to flex as they progressed.

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Scaling Up What Works

The lab-built prototype lines have received good engagement from the firm’s production sites and demonstrated improvements in terms of reducing work in progress, inventory and floorspace and, importantly, transforming the current paper-based record keeping to an automated system that will make it dramatically easier to retrieve data.

This has won enthusiastic buy-in and, as a result, the M4 team are beginning to industrialise some of the prototypes in the project and will be applying M4’s intelligent workbenches and statistical tools to the design of Meggitt’s new supersite in Ansty.

Measuring, monitoring and analysing what works has shaped the development of the project at Meggitt – both enabling success and making it possible to demonstrate it.

“Robotics, automation and AI are all great things,” Savani says, “When companies begin to think about Industry 4.0, it can be tempting to ask, ‘how can I use VR goggles?’ or ‘what will AI analytics do for me?’. It is great that we have such a rich collection of technologies coming online – it means we have a really full and exciting toolbox. But it is still a toolbox; you’ve got to know what to do with those tools.”

The New Toolbox

The potential of automation, robotics, AI, AR, VR and advanced analytics to transform the way we do business is as exciting a prospect for aerospace as it is for any sector. However, some of the characteristics of the sector significantly shape the scope of that potential.

First, the long lifecycles of aircraft and their component parts means the sector is burdened more than most with legacy equipment and systems.

Second, there’s the way the aerospace supply chain is tiered. The rigid vertical supply-chain structure that is intrinsic to aerospace makes supply chain connectivity one area where aerospace needs to lead Industry 4.0.

Third, and perhaps most important, the opportunities associated with supply-chain integration, when combined with the safetycritical nature of the industry, make security – and the development of associated standards – a crucial development consideration.

These characteristics are creating new opportunities for those in the supply chain who have been quick to recognise the way they shape of the potential of Industry 4.0.

“Being able to innovate quickly is key to shortening the development lifecycle,” says Stephen Dyson of custom prototypes and lowvolume production parts supplier Protolabs, “manufacturers are looking for suppliers who can respond quickly. The speed of additive manufacturing makes the rapid production of design iterations possible, which helps to hasten pre-compliance testing, improve risk avoidance, and get to the design and manufacture of real parts quickly.”

“Being able to innovate quickly is key to shortening the development lifecycle,” says Stephen Dyson of custom prototypes and lowvolume production parts supplier Protolabs, “manufacturers are looking for suppliers who can respond quickly. The speed of additive manufacturing makes the rapid production of design iterations possible, which helps to hasten pre-compliance testing, improve risk avoidance, and get to the design and manufacture of real parts quickly.”

Stephen Dyson - Head of Industry 4.0

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Issue no 3 - AUGUST 2018 industry 4.0

New Opportunities for Innovation in the Aerospace Supply Chain

3D-printing technologies, like those Protolabs deploy, have been heavily invested in throughout the aerospace sector, Dyson says.

“The most salient innovation additive manufacturing promises aerospace is in lightweighting,” he explains, “the honeycomb internal structures that additive manufacturing enables couldn’t be created through traditional processes; and this opens up exciting possibilities to reduce weight – and therefore fuel consumption – in both new and replacement parts.”

The technology is also enabling an existential shift – from mass production to mass customisation.

“We’re seeing an immediate benefit through the additive manufacturing technologies we deploy in terms of the cost and speed of development,” continues Dyson, “We’re working with our customers to develop in a shorter time and without the high upfront costs. But we recognise Industry 4.0 technologies present a wider opportunity to bring down costs and lead times further throughout the supply chain. From our perspective, this means looking at methods for more integrated access to share CAD designs with our clients. But it goes way beyond this – every organisation has a challenge it wants to solve.”

As Savani asserts, any Industry 4.0 journey must start with business objectives: “For me, it’s all about knowing what you want to have as business outcomes, then seeing Industry 4.0 as a set of tools that can help you achieve these outcomes.”

Protolabs Case Study

ISAR Gears - Electronic Drives for Aerospace

Company: Isar Gears

Product:

Electronic Drives

Industry:

Aerospace

Service:

Direct Metal Laser Sintering

Aerospace engineering has always been one of the most innovative industries. Every design is characterised by exceptional load capacity with minimum weight and space requirements. The increasing demand for electric drives brings further challenges. Isar Gears in Ismaning, Germany, is only too happy to take these challenges on - with expert knowledge and support from Protolabs.

View FULL CASE STUDY

Video:

Meggitt and Industry 4.0

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