Manufacturing

Feature:

Volvo Aero capitalises on CAD

22 October 2009

Volvo Aero develops and produce components for high tech aircraft, rocket and gas turbine engines

Volvo Aero is establishing a reputation for lightweight engine part design and manufacturing with the help of Siemens PLM Software and Microsoft. Mark Webb learned how the company made it happen.

Volvo Aero is at the leading edge of aerospace engine part design and manufacturing. As a specialist, the company is well set to supply a competitive but growing marketplace. It has a number of projects in development and is investing in technology to maintain its good reputation in an industry in which a technological edge can provide a business edge.

While retaining its strategic military contracts, the company changed direction as military budgets got smaller. “We considered it vital to get into the commercial aviation market in order to grow as a company and to avoid being dependent on our local market,” explains Olof Pettersson, the company’s head of systems/controls and product support.

Pettersson acknowledges the opportunities afforded by the aerospace industry but highlights the strong pressure on airlines and their suppliers to lower fuel consumption. Volvo Aero has turned this challenge into a business opportunity by working to reduce the weight of the fan frame that it supplies to engine manufacturers.

The target is to reduce the weight of cold and hot engine structures by 20 per cent, which will reduce the overall weight of future engines by almost three per cent. The company estimates that this will save 17,000 kilograms of fuel for a typical single aisle aircraft per year.

“It’s a joint effort with our customers and suppliers,” says Pettersson. “If we can build a lighter frame to hold the engine, it takes less fuel to keep the aircraft in the air.” He describes how a cross functional team, made up of diverse players from production, purchasing and engineering design, works on a new version of a product. “It’s not much different from the car industry,” says Pettersson, who previously worked at auto manufacturer Saab. “Multi-functional teams work on a project and sometimes the suppliers are part of it.”

Volvo Aero’s 3,000 IT users worldwide rely mainly on a Microsoft infrastructure of Windows Server and SQL Server. Sven-Olof Höög, site and global account manager for Volvo IT/Aero, explains the background: “In the early nineties the Volvo Aero company’s management asked us to develop an IT strategy to keep costs down over time and to respond more quickly to the business demands on IT.” The strategy Höög and his colleagues developed was to remove the company’s multiple home-made systems and to use an out of the box platform: “We decided to reduce the platforms to one, to solve one problem,” says Höög. “You can do anything on any platform but we realised the key was to choose one and to stick to it.”

Unlike many other companies, Volvo Aero chose to run SAP on Windows and built the system in a multi-year project, exchanging the home-made mainframe systems when SAP went live, a ‘big bang’ approach. A similar effort saw a change to Siemens PLM Software’s NX solution, also running on Windows, in the engineering department. Höög says the IT department reduced costs by 50 per cent in the first ten years of strategy fulfilment, mainly by cutting down the number of people required for development and maintenance. For example, operating in different currencies in SAP is straightforward and not a programming task. “Total cost per user per year is below SEK 50,000 (US$7,000) and in the IS/IT community that is very good,” says Höög, adding: “This is also in combination with quality delivered measured by customer and user satisfaction well over 90 per cent every year.” The cost includes everything to support more than 2,000 users in Sweden, 500 in Norway and 300 or so in North America.

The biggest benefit of a digitalised workflow is that we can control which configuration we are going to take to production

Olof Pettersson, Volvo Aero Höög says he is very satisfied with the support received from Microsoft since the first decision to choose its platform and he acknowledges that Microsoft has become a key partner, helping him keep down costs through its economic licensing, which compares very favourably with engineering IT license costs.

Investment in IT to serve its engineering effort has followed a conventional path, from computer aided design (CAD) to computer aided manufacturing (CAM) and product lifecycle management (PLM). Volvo Aero’s engineering team consists of approximately 70 NX users and 30 NX CAM users. It uses NX6, the latest version of Siemens PLM Software’s CAD solution. Volvo Aero also uses Siemens PLM Software’s Teamcenter to manage products through their lifecycle. These applications run on Microsoft Windows Server and also make use of Microsoft SQL Server. The company manages its overall business in SAP running on a Windows Server platform, with SAP also acting as a storage area for engineering documentation.

“Among our users, Volvo Aero is one of the most technology-based businesses and it applies our software from many different angles,” says Jan Larsson, marketing director EMEA – NX at Siemens PLM Software. “The company’s manufacturing is on a very high level. Its products for the space industry, for example, are very extreme, not big volume but a few pieces that are very expensive and it’s important the factory manufactures correctly in the beginning. It simulates the manufacturing process very carefully.”

Typical of this high-level work is the design and manufacture of the turbines and nozzles for the next generation of Ariane rockets, the basis of European space exploration and exploitation. New manufacturing technologies being exploited include fabrication, weld modelling, automation and metal deposition.

Volvo Aero chose NX for CAD when attracted by its macro functionality. Like other aerospace manufacturers, it applies a strict methodology to comply with regulations and standards and it configures its software to provide the correct environment. Pettersson says that the company’s engineers have to be qualified to use NX to the appropriate levels or they lose certification. There is pressure on staff to develop their skills as new projects demand more technical capability in using the software and so the company provides various levels of training and support.

Engineers can make use of Web-based training resources and Siemens PLM staff have become part of the Volvo Aero team to mentor engineers by being around to answer questions and share expertise as staff familiarise themselves with the software.

After a bedding-in period, engineers have grown to appreciate the advantages of having software technology free them from repetitive processes. “Volvo Aero’s methodology is very strict,” says Larsson. “It can’t risk quality. With NX and Teamcenter, the department can focus more easily on manufacturability and product cost as well as tracking quality.”

“It’s more efficient to design the model correctly the first time,” says Pettersson. “In our environment the product lives for a number of years, so there will be changes. It’s therefore vital that we build a model that we can change without building it again.” Design and production engineers work together and the production department has visibility of the same model so that it can provide feedback on manufacturability.

The engineering design team creates and tests models of all the intermediate stages towards a master 3D model. Because all the stages reside in NX, updates can be applied in one stage and then reflected automatically throughout the project. It exports data from NX in a simplified format suitable to run various simulations in specialist software packages used in the aerospace industry. The company adopted NX CAM in 2003 and uses it to release models to manufacturing, to pick up scheduled orders and progress to the manufacturing execution system (MES). “It’s of vital importance that we have a connection between the design model and the production model, and that’s what we do in NX,” says Pettersson.

“The biggest benefit of a digitalised workflow is that we can control which configuration we are going to take to production,” he adds. Previously it was difficult to evaluate the different versions of a project and to choose which prototype to move on to the production stage. “We are delivering faster time to market, or faster time to knowledge, for Volvo Aero,” concludes Maths Mattsson, marketing manager for Siemens PLM Software’s Nordic operation.

A larger NX CAM team takes over when it’s time to model for production. Internally small groups scrutinise and verify engineering models in NX, without having to commit to drawings. The company still has to produce drawings for external certification before final manufacturing.

It’s a given that every final product meets the technical requirements. But, as a manufacturer, Volvo Aero can work on how it makes the part and what materials go into the part. For engine frames, cast titanium is giving way to composite components. “We can still reduce the weight of new engines by 10-20 per cent compared to classic designs,” says Pettersson. “We are now fabricating structures from sheet metal and composites rather than casting, which has a minimum thickness. With composites you can have the structure thicker only where you need it.” The company has introduced weld modelling so that it can test and perfect what is a vital technology for making lightweight fabrications. It is also taking advantage of its advanced automation, including multitasking machine tools driven by a MES data flow, to provide quality and robustness and to bring down costs.

Work continues on matching IT provision to the needs of its engineering and manufacturing. Volvo Aero has recently purchased a company that has expertise in combining composite and metal – glueing carbon fibre and aluminium for example. The company’s engineers are working out how to effectively model this new technology within NX and there is ongoing research into this, supported by Siemens PLM Software.

With two sites in Sweden and one in Norway, the company is also in the early stages of finding out about collaboration by using an engineering ‘hub’ but this is at least a year away. The technical connections are possible but there are security and legal issues to work through.

Aircraft component makers are feeling the pressure from cost-conscious airlines and vote-conscious governments to reduce the amount of fuel consumed and so research and development can give an aero engine part manufacturer like Volvo Aero an edge. Advanced CAD, CAM and PLM software supports this work by reducing time to knowledge and making it easier to identify which prototypes to carry forward to manufacturing.

By digitising its processes, improving traceability and repeatability, Volvo Aero has been able to reduce its price to customers and has won several new deals, including one with Rolls Royce. An advantage in technology has become an advantage in doing business.

This article first appeared in the Autumn 2009 edition of Prime.

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