Introduce to Aviation Manufacturing and Designing Process
Aircraft manufacturers need cost-effective, quality, and highly technical facilities. To figure out all these objectives, this post provides a quick overview of several things to consider for the design and construction of plants for aircraft and related components.
Whether it’s a small single-engine husky or a massive Airbus A300-600ST , aircraft are designed in a three-stage process. This consists of the conceptual design phase, the preliminary design phase, and finally the detail design phase.
Aircraft Manufacturing
All about aviation manufacturing and assembly building must be driven by the manufacturing process, such as process flow, process rate, and process requirements. The building should fully support the process, along with keeping the weather out. The manufacturing process must be fully understood at a macro level by the facility planning as well as the engineering team in order to ensure that a reliable building concept is developed that is integrated with manufacturing needs and requirements.
Moreover, individual manufacturing areas within the building should be understood on a limited level just to make sure that the facility as well as infrastructure supports manufacturing in an efficient manner. Here are some of the things to consider related to an assembly building that must be evaluated during planning to start a reliable building design:
Type and style:
The style and type of manufacturing process may include flow line, fixed position assembly, subassembly shops, parallel assembly, fishbone assembly – all of them should determine the building’s size and layout. The flow of different manufacturing will be used for different components or steps within the overall process.
Assembly rate and process of work:
The assembly rate and work-in-process can figure out the total size of the building. The designer and engineers need to know how many aircraft will be built in a week, a month, or a year. Besides, how many units will be in production at a single time and in how many assembly positions?
Methods of assembling and manufacturing components:
Methods of designing components and parts may include bonding, riveting, fasteners, or welding. These methods figure out the important support utilities and potential risks to assembly workers, defining which safety features will be required to incorporate into the building design.
Sizes of components:
Sizes of such components and parts like wings, vertical stabilizers, main body, engines, and wing joint components are important. This shows the entire size of the facility necessary to accommodate several components and types of doors, their speed, and staging space requirements.
Manufacturing tools, fixtures, and jigs:
Manufacturing and designing tools, fixtures, and jigs are directly related to the space requirements, manufacturing process, and utilities. Figuring out how parts move into the tools or whether the tools move to meet components are serious issues. If tooling can be parked out of the way during specific processes or if there are aircraft moves, it means that additional space is needed.
Materials transportation:
Materials transportation contains getting the parts and components into the building and moving them around inside. Parts may arrive via aircraft, train, ship, or truck. Specialized fixtures can be used to transfer components into the assembly building. Once inside, material transportation may contain true under-hung cranes, vertical lift cranes, transfer bridge cranes, fixed jib crane assembly stations, multiple hoist cranes, wire-guided vehicles, carts, tugs, forklifts, air bearing jigs on floors, and man lifts. The selected systems impact the entire building height, floor flatness, structural support requirements, floor joint types, floor quality, and floor finishes.
Manufacturing utilities:
Most aviation manufacturing has a reliance on clean, dry compressed air as the main utility. Hence, providing reliability, redundancy, distribution, maintainability, and access flexibility for compressed air is important. 400Hz aircraft power is often a serious test requirement. It requires being close to aviation due to voltage loss.
