20 Boeing Frontiers Photos: (Right) Chris Barney, process engineer at the Interiors Responsibility Center in Everett, Wash., checks one of the center’s newly installed automation tools. (Below) Brittany Ballard, equipment engineer, near the New Assembly Process robot cell in Frederickson, Wash., which will automate drilling work on 777 empennage parts. jobs that simply aren’t efficient to do manually, or that cause the most injuries or quality issues. “We’re not trying to just solve the easy problems. We’re deliberately going after the difficult ones,” said Patrick Hopkins, Right Size Equipment manager at the Interiors Responsibility Center in Everett, Wash. His work area has started using a robotically controlled router to cut bin face panels. Employees there also are testing an automated sander to smooth composite interior parts—a tedious, time-consuming job by hand—and an automated process to wrap parts with decorative coverings. That would reduce the manual labor for that task by about 90 percent and reduce a 20-minute job to about a quarter of that time, Hopkins said. Work still is ongoing to perfect this automation, but employees who perform the tasks are supportive of the effort. “This is a start,” said Ronald Tice, a toolmaker in the Interiors Responsibility Center. “There’s excitement on the production floor about this.” At the nearby silk-screen shop, employees produce wallpaper for airplane interiors, using a manual process to combine layers of material into the finished product. The process, in addition to being a repetitive-motion injury risk, creates troublesome static electricity, resulting in wrinkled layers. To combat the problems, shop employees helped develop a prototype machine that automates most of the production steps. The machine has greatly reduced manufacturing time and injury risks and has cut defects by 82 percent. In the past two years, the machine has helped make and cut 10 million feet (3,050,000 meters) of wallpaper, according to Jesse Howard, a toolmaker in the Interiors Responsibility Center Right Size Equipment Lab. “The machine uses the static to get the layers to stick together,” Howard said. “It also lays down the layers without wrinkles, and the glue in the middle layer doesn’t have time to get contaminated by dust and other small particles.” Robots already perform drilling and countersinking work on the single-piece heat shield (the heat shield protects the pylon and wing from the engines’ exhaust heat) for the 777 and 787 models at Fabrication’s site in Auburn, Wash., and automated tools are gearing up to make the 737 MAX heat shield. The site’s expert tool- and die-makers also have started using similar technology to dramatically speed up an everyday chore. Superplastic forming dies are used to shape heat shields and other parts under high heat and pressure at the site. Employees coat the dies with spray-on lubricants to make sure the pieces they’re shaping don’t stick to the die. It’s a necessary step, but it leaves a stubborn film on the dies, which need to be cleaned before employees can use them again. “That has been a purely manual process that involves scouring pads and sanding discs,” said Marc Petersen, a Boeing Research & Technology metals engineer. “It’s been a problem for a long time. There really was a lot of motivation to find a safer and quicker solution.” The site’s tool- and die-makers take turns performing the cleaning job, which can take up to an entire shift and isn’t ergonomically friendly. “It’s
Frontiers October 2015 Issue
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