One of the World's Largest Shot Peening Machines at Airbus

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Vol. 5
May Issue
Year 2004
Publication for the
Peening, Blasting and
Vibratory Finishing
Industries
www.mfn.li
The MFN
Trainer Column:
Peening in the Age of
Damage Tolerance
page 34
The Shot
Peening Process:
Developing Prediction
page 32-33
One of the World's Largest Shot Peening Machines at Airbus
4th Asian
Shot Peening
Workshop
8-10th Nov 2004
page 15
SCIENCE UPDATE:
Fatigue Response of
the Various Titanium
Alloy Classes to
Shot Peening
page 38-40
Separate Print: Vol. 5
May Issue
Year 2004
"One of the World's Largest Shot
Peening Machines installed at Airbus"
Peening
Airbus Innovation for A 380: Laser-
Beam Welding
A major challenge in aircraft design is
saving weight and therefore reducing
fuel consumption and airline operating
costs. Airbus, an EADS joint company
with BAE SYSTEMS, has developed a
number of new technologies, i.e. new
materials, new structural designs and
new manufacturing processes in order
to meet these challenges. These innovations
and new technologies will
be incorporated in the A 380 family,
which is the Airbus flagship for the
21st century.
Integral structures for aircraft fuselage
today consist of aluminium sheets and
stringers, whereby innumerable rivets
are needed as joints. However, Airbus
has recently used laser-beam welded
structures instead of rivets for A 318
and A 380 fuselage shells – a first in
the aircraft industry.
One ‘Airbus Center of Competence’ for
manufacturing fuselage shells is based
in Nordenham in northern Germany,
where the laser-beam welding process
for fuselage shells has been developed
and introduced. Two laser facilities
have been installed to date and the
third is under construction.
After the laser-beam welding process,
forming the shells into the final contour
is the last step in the production
chain before painting and further assembling.
One of the World's Largest
Shot Peening Machines
installed at Airbus
For many years, shot peen forming has been regarded as a rather outdated
process in terms of process control and computability. Hand peening has
been necessary in most applications at least for final correction steps and,
as a result, the industry has not taken shot peen forming seriously into account
when investing in new production programmes. The same was true
of Airbus Germany until 2001, when the company needed final forming to
be carried out on new fuselage shells. By a happy coincidence, a meeting
of Airbus engineers with KSA Kugelstrahlzentrum Aachen GmbH occurred
at around the same time.
MFN page 18 Vol. 5, May Issue
Peening
Success Factors
+ process automation
+ integration in Airbus production chain
+ keeping with budget
cost and time
Pre - Run Production
at KSA Site
+ tests and process qualification
+ process fine tuning
+ programming design changes
Analysis
+
Concept
+ customer
requirements
+ technical and
economic
feasibility
+ team building
(Airbus, Baiker,
KSA)
Development of
Customized
Machine (Baiker)
+ less than 1 year
+ computer simulation
+ pre-acceptance at Baiker
Turn-key
at
Airbus Site
+ program loading
+ short start-up
and training
New
Component
Service
+ offline programming
of new fuselage shells
+ data transfer
and program release
Customer Needs for an
Automated Forming Process
Forming the fuselage shells into
the final contour had to be flexible
to design changes, applicable
to a wide range of fuselage shells
with a length of 4-11 m, reliable in
a 3-shift operation and fully automated.
Another need was full
integration of the forming process
into the production chain.
In other words: Airbus did not
wish to have any manual processing,
not even for corrections.
And Airbus asked for a qualified
established process as well as for a
qualified partner to implement the
new process at their site.
KSA’s Implementation
Programme
The first step of the implementation
programme was a thorough
analysis of customer requirements
accompanied by tests in terms of
technical and economic feasibility.
For example, the through-put time
had to be at least as fast as laserbeam
welding, with the potential
of being reduced to just half of the
laser process time.
Because of the very tight schedule
dictated by A 380 planning, Airbus
opted for KSA’s peen forming process,
which is already established in several
Ariane programmes, and for Baiker as
the machine supplier. KSA, serving as
a general contractor to Airbus, was and
still is responsible for implementation
of the whole process. Baiker, as a subcontractor
to KSA, delivered the shot
peening machine.
Pre-Run Production and Process
Qualification
After finishing a joint testing programme
successfully, KSA peen formed
more than 100 qualification parts and
serial shells on one of its two peen forming
facilities in Aachen, Germany.
This pre-run production served two
purposes: Firstly, to qualify the shot
peen forming process in accordance
with quality standards at Airbus. Secondly,
to peen form the A 380 fuselage
shells in Aachen as these had to be
manufactured before installation
of the serial production
machine in Nordenham. As
a result, it was possible to
form the shells without delaying
planning at Airbus
for the introduction of the
A 380. Besides, the general
contractor was able to improve
process performance
and to adopt design changes
without difficulty.
Machine Requirements
At the same time, Baiker
developed, built and assembled
the machine for
pre-acceptance tests at the
Baiker plant in Zurich, Switzerland.
The overall dimensions of
the machine are truly impressive: The
peening cabin alone is 13.5 m long, 4.5
m wide and 6.0 m high.
The facility features an injector-gravitation
peening system for shot of 4.00
mm in diameter. It is designed for
forming components with maximum
dimensions of 11,000 x 3,100 x 1,500
mm3 (length x breadth x height) and
can be positioned to an accuracy of ±
0.1 mm for all six robot-axes. The same
conditions are available on both additional
axes for corresponding linear
movement and for the transport wagon
which charges the components.
The Swiss company met all the project
deadlines and delivered the machine
to the Airbus plant in Nordenham
within 1 year. Key factors necessary to
achieve these goals included computer
simulation in conjunction with the German
robot manufacturer Motoman,
simultaneous engineering and regular
project meetings with Airbus and KSA
in order to exchange new information
arising from pre-run production.
Turn-key at Airbus Site
Installation and acceptance tests of the
machine took place in Nordenham in
November 2003, fitting in perfectly
with Airbus planning. The machine
was then programmed by KSA for the
automated peen forming of 8 different
A 380 fuselage shells using online velocity
measurement for machine calibra-
Implementing Automated Shot Peening at Airbus' Site
MFN page 19
Peening MFN page 20 Vol. 5, May Issue
tion as well as a 3-D laser measurement
system for the automated teaching of
peening traces.
A short training session for Airbus
operators followed. Because of the
high degree of automation, no extra
personnel is necessary for the shot
peening machine; the programs are
simply called up by the operators of the
nearby laser-beam welding machine. In
order to ensure high availability of the
machine, Baiker and KSA have also defined
a regular maintenance schedule.
New Component Service
Airbus planning for the introduction
of laser-beam welded fuselage shells
to other aircraft is certainly ambitious:
Besides the A 380 programme, laserbeam
welded panels will be used in
the A 318 and A 340. And the Airbus
single aisle family will follow.
All new technology and machinery
must therefore be designed for high
flexibility. KSA offers a ‘new component
service’, which means carrying out
programming offline and then transferring
the program to the machine in Nordenham.
In this way, a new fuselage
shell for shot peening can be introduced
within an extremely short time and with
a minimum of disruption to serial 3-
shift production at the plant.
Start of a New Era in Shot Peening
The Airbus example can be seen as a
first benchmark for shot peen forming
as a state-of-the-art industrial process,
i.e. a fully automated process which is
integrated in the aircraft manufacturing
chain and requires very little operator
time. Moreover, the peen forming process
automation implemented at Airbus
is completely transferable to all other
shot peening applications. The times of
‘trial and error’ are over.
It is now time to regard shot peening in
a new light: High-precision robot-aided
machines and new process control
technologies raise shot peening to the
level of modern industrial processes.
Standards such as ‘complete process
IN THE SPOT LIGHT:
KSA specializes in shot peening
process automation and offers
one-stop shopping services and
solutions for demanding customers.
For Airbus, the German
company is serving as a general
contractor, implementing automated
shot peening in the form
of contract peening and system
integration services.
Baiker AG in Zurich delivered
the shot peening equipment.
The Swiss company manufactures
CNC and robotic dry &
wet peening machines and
works mainly for the aviation
and automotive industries. It
was founded in 1935.
Author: Axel Friese
Tel. +49.2407.51.565
E-mail: axel.friese@ebv.de
For Information on process control:
KSA GmbH
Weststrasse 24
52074 Aachen, Germany
Tel. +49.241.879795-0
Fax: +49.241.879795-9
E-mail: info@kugelstrahlzentrum.de
www.ksa.de.com
For information on equipment:
Baiker AG
Alpenstrasse 1
8152 Glattbrugg, Switzerland
Tel. +41.43.211 8663
Fax: +41.43.211 6271
E-mail: info@baiker.ch
www.baiker.ch
control and documentation’ and ‘computability’
can now also be applied to
shot peening.
In the future, the Airbus example might
well encourage process engineers in the
aerospace and automotive industries to
take advantage of new shot peening solutions
of this kind, resulting in higher
quality and better cost efficiency for the
customer.