I’m going to take a short break from sustainability this week because I saw an email from Composites World that kind of surprised me. What really surprised me is the size of the machine that headlines this particular article. The picture that surprised me is the first pic in this post.
Rocket Lab Automated Fiber Placement Machine (courtesy Composites World)
This monster was built by Electroimpact in Mukilteo, WA, and was delivered and is being installed at the Rocket Lab USA, Inc. facility in Middle River, MD. This thing is going to be used to automate all of the production of large composite structures for Rocket Lab’s Neutron Rocket.
This thing weighs in at 99 tons, is 12 meters (about 36 feet) tall, and is going to be used to make the 7 meter diameter by 28 meter long interstage and its fairing. That’s 21 feet in diameter and almost 85 feet long for those of us in the US that have not quite adopted the metric system of units yet. The second stage storage tank is also going to be built on this monster. That tank is 5 meters (15 feet) in diameter.
This machine can lay down 300 feet a minute of continuous carbon fiber, and has the capacity to make something over 90 feet long. It also has an in-line inspection system that inspects the carbon fiber / epoxy tows as they are being laid down in real time. The data from this inspection system is captured and reviewed to ensure that the part that comes out has undetectable flaws if any.
If you take a close look at the fiber head of this thing, the round head with all of the spindles coming out of it, it appears that this thing can lay down as many as 15 tows of carbon fiber at a time. And since they are probably using 30k tows (30,000 fibers in each ribbon or tow), that means that they can lay down on the order of a half a million total fibers in one layer. And if they can go 300 feet a minute, that means 135 billion feet of single fiber at a time.
That’s a LOT of fiber.
The upshot of this is that this machine all by itself is going to save as much as 150,000 hours of manufacturing time in the build of the Neutron rocket’s primary structural shell. It appears to me that Rocket Lab is going to be pretty serious competition for Mr. Musk’s SpaceX. And since the Neutron rocket is intended to be reusable, they are definitely aiming at the same market that SpaceX is in.
So, how do they cook a part this large. By cook, in the parlance of composites of course, I mean cure the resin. Well, that’s the next set of large machines I want to highlight in this post. There are a couple of autoclaves in the world that are some of the largest ever made. These are for the Boeing 787 and Airbus A350. The largest one can swallow an entire nose fairing for either one of those aircraft, and is actually being used right now at what used to be a Vought aircraft production facility in North Charleston, South Carolina. Boeing bought that facility from Vought and is now using it as a final assembly line for the 787. A couple pictures of this monster are below just to show you the size of this thing.
This is the largest autoclave in the world and was built by a company that has been in the business of building autoclaves since 1988. The company is Aerospace Service and Controls, Inc., which opened a 1200 square foot shop in Sun Valley, CA that year. The two founders of that company had worked at Baron Blakeslee who was the dominant autoclave manufacturer in the 1970’s and 1980’s. They quickly outgrew their 1200 square foot shop and moved to larger digs (3000 square feet) the next year. And the year after that they did a retrofit job for Lockheed Skunk Works which was located in Burbank at the time. When Lockheed move that iconic piece of their company to Palmdale in 1990, ASC helped them move their entire production facility to Palmdale and also retrofit most of the control systems on Lockheed’s processing equipment. They soon became the go to contractor for autoclaves and composites process control systems for GE, Lockheed, and Northrop.
Since that time, they have become one of the largest autoclave and composites process control system companies in the business. Their customers are the entire suite of aerospace composites manufacturers.
Another large autoclave manufacturer as well as composites equipment manufacturer is Kawasaki Heavy Industries in Japan. In 2014 they delivered one of the largest autoclaves in the world to the Boeing 787 production facility in Asia located in Nagoya, Japan. This is another beast, at a little under 30 feet inside diameter and a length overall of over 90 feet, it can swallow most of the front end of a Boeing 787 or an Airbus A350.
These are just a few examples of the large machines and pieces of processing equipment that have been built and installed in the last 10 years or so for building the large composite structures that are increasingly the future of the aerospace industry.
This also demonstrates something that I have been talking about for a while now. What used to be specialty materials because they were expensive and hard to manufacture right have not become not only mainstream, but these materials have elevated composites to the mainstream. And they have also enabled several of the more promising technologies that when I started out as an engineer were mere fantasies.
In other words, the lyrics of an iconic rock and roll song are appropriate here – “Our future’s so bright we gotta wear shades!”
That’s about it for this week. I hope everyone that reads these posts enjoys them as much as I enjoy writing them. As usual I will post this first on my website – www.nedpatton.com – as well as on LinkedIn. And if anyone wants to provide comments to this, I welcome them with open arms. Comments, criticisms, etc. are all quite welcome. I really do want to engage in a conversation with all of you about composites because we can learn so much from each other as long as we share our own perspectives.
I also wanted to remind everyone again that I am working on my second book. This one is about what I have been writing in these newsletters for the last 6 months or so – sustainability of composites and a path to the future that does not include using fossil fuels for either the raw materials or the process energy to make composites. Stay tuned to this space and I will let everyone know about my progress as I write this one. I’m pretty close to the end of the book, with about 50,000 words so far, so it is getting close to the time when I have to start looking for a publisher. So, I should be done with the first good draft of this thing by the end of this month or maybe the first couple of weeks of next month. I’ll let everyone know how this goes, and also what publisher picks up this one.
Finally, I still need to plug my first book, so here’s the plug. The book pretty much covers the watershed in composites, starting with a brief history of composites, then introducing the Periodic Table and why Carbon is such an important and interesting element. The book was published and made available last August, and is available both on Amazon and from McFarland Books – my publisher. However, the best place to get one is to go to my website and buy one. I will send you a signed copy for the same price you would get charged on Amazon, except that I charge $8 shipping. Anyway, here’s the link to get your signed copy: https://www.nedpatton.com/product-page/the-string-and-glue-of-our-world-signed-copy. And as usual, here’s a picture of the book.
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