Aerospace majors focus on rapid prototyping

A TCT Conference and Exhibition product story

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Aug 4, 2006

TCT 2006 will play host to two of the leading lights from the aerospace sector when both Boeing and Rolls Royce deliver papers at the rapid manufacturing focused event.

TCT 2006 will play host to two of the leading lights from the aerospace sector when both Boeing and Rolls Royce deliver papers at the rapid manufacturing focused event taking place on 19th and 20th September at the Heritage Motor Centre, Gaydon.

Chris Huskamp of Boeing will be co-presenting a manufacturing management paper with Pat Warner of Renault F1 entitled: "Immediate industry needs to fully engage the rapid manufacturing revolution".

This paper will focus on the four key areas required to enhance industry evolution.

A further highlight at the conference is a technical paper being presented by Dr Jeff Allen of Rolls Royce.

This paper will focus on using rapid product development to achieve lean manufacturing processes.

For the rapid method to become embedded in production, cost and performance issues must be addressed.

This presentation addresses some of the opportunities, challenges to adoption and progress made by emergent additive technologies.

Considerations for strategies for complete and hybrid components will also be discussed.

Running alongside the conference will be an exhibition, with more than 60 leading RPD companies presenting their products and services.

As the only UK event focused on providing solutions for accelerating products to market, visitors will be able to learn of the latest RPD technologies while witnessing real case studies from manufacturers in both their own industry and a wider range of sectors.

Huntsman Advanced Materials, one of the headline sponsors, will also be presenting its range of technologies many of which are in use within the aerospace industry: Epocast 1633-A41/B is being used for the high-strength reinforcement of the fasteners installed in overhead baggage lockers and other honeycomb core parts.

In addition working with engineers from Rolls-Royce and the University of Sheffield, the Huntsman team of Araldite experts developed a unique epoxy-based syntactic for Rolls-Royce's Trent 900 which helps to reduce vibration while providing extra robustness in structural strength.

Also showing at the exhibition will be 3D Scanners (UK) .

The company will be showcasing the PolyWorks suite of RE software.

PolyWorks was recently used by Lockheed Martin on a project where scanned date was required from an aerodynamically similar airframe during development.

PolyWorks helped to shorten both data acquisition time and data processing time by 80%.

TCT 2006 is supported by Society of British Aerospace Companies (SBAC), GTMA, the RPMA, the PMMMA and the DTI Manufacturing Advisory Service.