Excelling in the Air

The high demands on quality and the enormous pressure of global competition are forcing manufacturers and machine suppliers alike to develop ever productive manufacturing solutions for safety-critical aerospace components. The DMG MORI Aerospace Excellence Center, with its wide range of services, aims to support its customers with regard to whatever is asked of them.

The global aerospace sector has grown consistently in recent years. This growth is driven by the need for new fuel-efficient engines and the resulting new generations of aircraft. Single-aisle planes are expected to make up around 75 percent of the expected total number of passenger aircraft in the next 20 years. These include, in particular, the new A320neo Airbus family and the Boeing B737MAX.The global aerospace sector has grown consistently in recent years. This growth is driven by the need for new fuel-efficient engines and the resulting new generations of aircraft. Single-aisle planes are expected to make up around 75 percent of the expected total number of passenger aircraft in the next 20 years. These include, in particular, the new A320neo Airbus family and the Boeing B737MAX.

Even wide-body aircraft such as the Airbus A350 are steadily replacing older and less efficient machines in this class. The enormous capacity requirements arising from the growth in global passenger traffic, especially in Asia, is the driving force in the industry.

Providing the best possible solutions

DMG MORI generates several million Euros from the sale of machining solutions in the aerospace sector. Due to the strict regulations imposed on the production of airborne and safety-critical components, customers in the aerospace industry have very specific production requirements. It is exactly this vital competence that is concentrated in the DMG MORI Aerospace Excellence Center. We support users with our over 20 years of technology experience, ensuring the internal build-up of knowledge in the relevant markets, so our customers are offered the best possible solution by DMG MORI for their respective needs.

The Aerospace Excellence Center is involved in all phases of customer and order acquisition. We advise our customers on the optimization of their current machining processes and work with them from the very outset to develop the planning of the so-called green field projects. Special branch-specific and complex application-based machine tool requirements are incorporated into the customized machine solutions we realize for our customers.

Close cooperation with customers

The cooperation begins in the very early phases of a project. Feedback from customers is what ultimately drives our further and new development of machines and their equipment. This may result in special customer-specific solutions that we sometimes adopt as standard options at a later date. Added to this is our cooperation with scientific partners such as institutes and universities worldwide and numerous industrial partners primarily from the field of DMG MORI Qualified Products.

Bumps in the road

The use of hard-to-machine materials is one of the challenges in the machining of aerospace components. New high-temperature materials produced using powder metallurgy technology or ceramic composites will reach their limits in future where machinability is concerned.
Secondly, the production trends in the aerospace sector include automation, digitization and an integral mindset for the respective process chains. Automation in this case is not just about handling, but also about focusing on the process in order to develop overall processes that are more reliable and reproducible. For example, the green-button process, which is a safe and reliable process that manages without any manual interventions due to automatic monitoring and control.

Process optimization is vital

Today’s quantities and high-quality components justify these efforts more than ever. Digitization is a key aspect here. For example, the use of DMG MORI Technology Cycles or our app-based control and user interface CELOS. Producers of aerospace components are making more use of the possibilities of digitization within the machine in order to facilitate better analysis and comprehension and, thus, optimization of processes – even to control them adaptively where applicable. Many develop-ments are also being driven by universities so they can be introduced subsequently into a company’s day-to-day production with an acceptable degree of maturity.

Showcasing innovation at EMO 2019

We will be presenting solutions that use digitization to achieve safer, more reliable and, therefore, more productive processes, like the green-button processes already mentioned. We will be demonstrating the innovative DMG MORI Technology Cycle easycenterSET on a DMC 125 FD duoBLOCK machine. This comprises an automatically adjustable plate between the pallet and the component fixture that measures the center offset of the pre-centered part and centers it automatically with an accuracy of a few microns. The documentable result offers customers a high level of process reliability during mill-turn operations, especially when using automation solutions.

Must-see live demos

Our highlight in the aerospace field is an extensive process chain for the production of a turbine disk made of Inconel 718 on the DMC 65 FD monoBLOCK. Starting with the engineering phase with the help of Siemens NX CAM, Renishaw Productivity+ and Vericut, we will be presenting digital solutions for machine setup through to actual machining. Various ceramic, CBN and carbide tools from Sandvik Coromant will be used. We will also be demonstrating the grinding integration. The quality of the machining will be monitored and where necessary regulated during and after the process by means of in-process measurement. Using the Renishaw Sprint system, components that are difficult to measure and with properties such as bore radiuses or processing steps typical for such parts will be measured and evaluated. The Tool Control Center (TCC) captures the forces and bending moments on the tool parallel to processing, in order to demonstrate the capability of such systems for the production of safety-critical components such as turbine disks. The aim for the future will be to make all the process-relevant input and output data available to the customer via a simple interface. This will enable the creation of further analysis for verification of the results. In future, it should be possible to draw conclusions about process stability and to detect any process anomalies that arise in real-time.

Producers of aerospace components are making more use of the possibilities of digitization within the machine in order to facilitate better analysis and comprehension and, thus, optimization of processes.