Spirit will utilise the funds to build tooling, fabricate composite parts and machine complex metallic parts at its Wichita, Kan., facility. Spirit designs and manufactures both composite and metallic structures for commercial and defence customers.

With long-standing machining capabilities, Spirit produces more than 3 million parts annually for equipment manufacturers at peak production. The 5-axis centre in Wichita focuses on large, complex, soft metal parts for fuselage, pylon and wing structures, all built on high-tech, high-speed, latest-generation equipment and is part of 12M sqft of manufacturing space.

Our growing work on defence programs has provided a measure of stability for the company, and helped us as we shift capacity to serve other needs, particularly in the defence market

Duane Hawkins, Senior Vice President; President, Defense and Fabrication, Spirit AeroSystems

The company supports a number of military programs, including programs for the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Army.

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The company will use the time to further deep clean and sanitise workspaces and facilities as they continue to take precautions to protect the health and safety of its workforce against the COVID-19 pandemic.

When production does resume on the Boeing programs, the company will align the costs and workforce to the new level of production set by Boeing. This could potentially include additional workforce actions.

Operations in support of Spirit AeroSystems defence customers, Airbus, aftermarket and MRO, third party fabrication work, other non-Boeing work, and other growth programs will continue.

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The new facility, which will create more than 100 new jobs in Scotland has been equipped with state-of-the-art composite manufacturing machinery using the latest automation and robotics. With this new facility, Spirit will achieve the required rate of approximately 700 aircraft and 7,000 spoilers annually.

The opening of this new facility is part of Spirit’s journey to becoming a leader in advanced out of autoclave composite technology. It demonstrates how we can develop cost-effective new technologies and manufacturing processes that will play a central role in the next generation of aircraft programs.

Scott McLarty, Spirit AeroSystem’s senior vice president of Airbus programs

Spirit AeroSystems is one of the largest manufacturers of aerostructures in the world with design and builds capabilities for both commercial and defence customers. In addition to spoilers, the company currently produces Airbus’s A320 family leading and trailing edge.

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Gershenfeld likens the structure, which is made from tiny, identical, interlocking parts to chainmail. The parts, based on a novel geometry that Cheung developed with Gershenfeld, form a structure that is 10 times stiffer for a given weight than existing ultralight materials. But this new structure can also be disassembled and reassembled easily — such as to repair damage, or to recycle the parts into a different configuration.

The individual parts can be mass-produced; Gershenfeld and Cheung are developing a robotic system to assemble them into wings, airplane fuselages, bridges or rockets — among many other possibilities.

The new design combines three fields of research, Gershenfeld says: fibre composites, cellular materials (those made with porous cells) and additive manufacturing (such as 3-D printing, where structures are built by depositing rather than removing material).

With conventional composites used in everything from golf clubs and tennis rackets to the components of Boeing and Airbus’s new aircraft each piece is manufactured as a continuous unit. Therefore, manufacturing large structures, such as airplane wings, requires large factories where fibres and resins can be wound and parts heat-cured as a whole, minimising the number of separate pieces that must be joined in final assembly. That requirement meant, for example, Boeing’s suppliers have had to build enormous facilities to make parts for the 787.

The new technique allows much less material to carry a given load. This could not only reduce the weight of vehicles, lowering fuel and operating costs, but also reduce the costs of construction and assembly, while allowing greater design flexibility. The system is useful for anything you need to move, or put in the air or in space says Cheung, who will begin work this fall as an engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Centre.

In traditional composite manufacturing, the joints between large components tend to be where cracks and structural failures start. While these new structures are made by linking many small composite fibre loops, Cheung and Gershenfeld show that they behave like an elastic solid, with a stiffness, or modulus, equal to that of much heavier traditional structures — because forces are conveyed through the structures inside the pieces and distributed across the lattice structure.

What’s more, when conventional composite materials are stressed to the breaking point, they tend to fail abruptly and at large scale. But the new modular system tends to fail only incrementally, meaning it is more reliable and can more easily be repaired.

The researchers produced flat, cross-shaped composite pieces that were clipped into a cubic lattice of octahedral cells, a structure called a “cuboct” which is similar to the crystal structure of the mineral perovskite, a major component of Earth’s crust. While the individual components can be disassembled for repairs or recycling, there’s no risk of them falling apart on their own, the researchers explain. Like the buckle on a seat belt, they are designed to be strong in the directions of forces that might be applied in normal use, and require pressure in an entirely different direction in order to be released.

The possibility of linking multiple types of parts introduces a new degree of design freedom into composite manufacturing. The researchers show that by combining different part types, they can make morphing structures with identical geometry but that bend in different ways in response to loads: Instead of moving only at fixed joints, the entire arm of a robot or wing of an airplane could change shape.

Alain Fontaine, who directs the innovation program for aircraft manufacturer Airbus, says;

this new approach to building structures is really disruptive. It opens interesting opportunities in the way to design and manufacture aerostructures. These technologies can open the door to other opportunities” and have significant potential to lower manufacturing costs.

In addition to Gershenfeld and Cheung, the project included MIT undergraduate Joseph Kim and alumna Sarah Hovsepian (now at NASA’s Ames Research Centre). The work was supported by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency and the sponsors of the Centre for Bits and Atoms, with Spirit Aerosystems collaborating on the composite development.

Images by: Kenneth Cheung

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In 2005, Spirit AeroSystems began collaboration with Cornerstone Research Group (CRG) and CRG’s affiliate company, Spintech Ventures LLC, to refine and scale-up the technology. Spintech is now offering the technology under the trade name Smart Tooling. Spirit’s version of the technology, which includes enhancements to enable large, integrated, single-sided reinforced structures, is known as Inflexion.

Bill Smith, acting director of technology development at Spirit said;

The degree of integration of composite structural components has been limited to date by current tooling methods inflexion breaks through this barrier by providing tooling that can change states through the lay up and cure phases, allowing for extraction of the tool in spite of trapping features which would hinder current tooling methods. This enables, for example, the full integration of skins, stringers, and frames or ribs in one step.

Spintech Ventures was founded in October 2010 to commercialise exclusively licensed shape memory polymer technologies, including Smart Tooling, which had been developed by CRG. The company claim that Smart Tooling’s patented technology will allow composite manufacturers to significantly reduce some combination of labor, material, and capital cost, while significantly increasing production through-put in the production of composite parts with trapped features and/or complex shapes.

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Spirit is responsible for the forward fuselage section, pylon, and wing leading edge, Using advanced fibre placement equipment, the 787 composite forward fuselage is built as a single barrel at Spirit’s Wichita, Kan., facility. Once the composite plies are wrapped over the barrel’s complex, compound contours, it is wrapped and prepared for curing in a 70 ft. by 30 ft. autoclave. When completed, the forward fuselage sections are flown onboard the Dreamlifter, a modified 747 cargo plane, to one of Boeing’s final assembly facilities in either Everett, Wash., or Charleston, S.C.

Terry George, Spirit vice president, 787 program said;

As we roll out the 100th 787 forward fuselage today, I would like to congratulate all Spirit AeroSystems’ employees who support the 787, many who have been on the program since 2003, throughout the years we have faced many challenges but continue to refine the airplane configuration, enhance our production system, and methodically step up the production rate over the past few years. The 787 airplane brings significant value to the airlines and the flying public and we are proud to be a big part of the program.

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