MTORRES ADVANCING INNOVATION AT BIEMH 2016 - HALL 3, STAND G37

During this 29th edition of the International Machine-Tool Exhibition, BIEMH 2016, MTorres will demonstrate its latest technological developments. Among those highlighted will be it laminating composite manufacturing equipment, which the company is a world leader in the aerospace and defense industry: automatic tape laying machines (ATL) and fiber placement machines (AFP).  

MTorres latest innovation is a new generation of a hybrid ATL/AFP solution for the Airbus A350 XWB wing shells fabrication, that have been delivered to Airbus plants at Illescas (Spain) and Stade (Germany). The new platform combines AFP end effectors containing 24 -1/2” width with ATL heads being capable to be interchanged in less than 2 minutes. The AFP end effector has been designed to contain high weight spools, up to 9 Kg, reducing the need of end-effector changes.

This technical development has been an interesting challenge that arose in the A350 program . When the A350XWB was launched, Automatic Tape Laying (ATL) technology was defined as baseline to manufacture the composite wings main components with MTorres as the primary ATL provider for that program.

Since the initial implementation at Airbus, the focus was then put on increasing productivity and reducing material waste, so when the airplane production ramp-up happened new technologies were available in order to match the increasing demands with an optimum return on investment model. The result of this development is a ne xt generation of Hybrid ATL/AFP solution for wing skins fabrication, which provided a significant boost in productivity and a step change improvement in material scrap savings.

The flexibility of this new configuration provides excellent capability to optimize the wing shells programming allowing on one side an excellent ‘buy to fly’ ratio and reduction of final component weight.   Additionally, this new configuration opens the possibility of allowing the  end-effector to laminate other materials as glass-fiber, copper-mesh, or other materials, all within the same manufacturing cell and delivering a reduction in the usage of the lay-up mold , as well as overall logistics.

The project is complete with several cells integrated, allowing low operator dependency, optimum floor space usage and reduced logistic s.

The systems first units are fully commissioned at both Illescas and Stade plants, starting the production of the new wing shells being manufactured using the most advanced and efficient technology available today.