Automated Fiber Placement
Assembly Line
Plant tour: Middle River Aerostructure Systems, Baltimore, Md., U.S.
Current production programs at MRAS include the LEAP-1A engine for the Airbus A320neo, LEAP-1C for the Comac C919, the CF-6 engine for multiple civil and military widebody aircraft, the Passport 20 engine for Bombardier’s Global 7500 business jet, the CF34-10A engine for the Comac ARJ21 and the GE9X engine for the Boeing 777X.
“For us, it was the integration with engineering, ERP and MRP that was key,” says Diederich. “Plataine integrates into all of this. It manages the raw materials coming in, generates cut plans per our engineering and marks the labels on the kit plies. We can dynamically nest up to 10 parts. The Plataine software uses AI to recommend which rolls of raw material should be cut next.” What is dynamic nesting? “Optimizing the nests on the fly as the software receives new inputs or when we query it,” says Diederich. “It can also send us alarms to change materials or operations. The sorted ply information is output to the Eastman systems, which have “cut and collect” software that identifies plies for kits using different colored lights. These match stacking tables at the conveyor’s end. ”