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In traditional manufacturing when a product (such as a wing panel or wing spar) was designed the manufacturing process to build the product was of little consideration. The design of the product was manually created on a 2 dimensional drawing without investigation of what data could be included to achieve a more productive automated assembly (fastening) system. Even less development was expended on integration of part design and manufacturing to improve downstream processes and product quality. Today, every avenue of optimization and continuous quality improvement must be explored to create a lean manufacturing environment that produces low costs with high productivity at all levels. This paper will describe design and manufacturing engineering processes used to streamline creation of machine control data for automated fastening systems. Applying design for manufacturing concepts and automation of upstream processes to provide significant benefits in the production environment.

Boeing has relied upon the 767 ASAT (ASAT1) since 1983 to fasten the chords, stiffeners and rib posts to the web of the four 767 wing spars. The machine was originally commissioned with a Terra five axis CNC control. The Terra company went out of business and the controls were replaced with a custom DOS application in 1990. These are now hard to support so Boeing solicited proposals. Electroimpact proposed to retrofit with a Fanuc 31I CNC, and in addition, to replace all associated sensors, cables and feedback systems. This work is now complete on two of the four machines. Both left front and right front are in production with the new CNC control.

One of the most common damages occurred found on commercial airframes are dents and gouges. The usual repair for these damages includes installation of metallic doublers with rivets or with hi-loks. Sometimes these doublers are of complex design, because of multiple angles of the original damaged skin. Many times the damages are in hard to reach areas. In these cases the traditional metallic doubler repairs are not only time consuming and but also expensive. As the numerous holes are be drilled through the original structure, its fatigue life is adversely affected. For airline operators, time is valuable and they cannot afford to lose revenue by spending longer time for repairs. The use of bonded composite doublers offers the airframe manufacturers and aircraft repair facilities an alternative repair process that alleviates the abovementioned concerns.

Low rate initial production of the 777X flight control surfaces and wing edges has been underway at the Boeing St. Louis site since early 2017. Drilling, inspection, and temporary fastening tasks are performed by automated multi-function robotic systems supplied by Electroimpact. On the heels of the successful implementation of the initial four (4) systems, Phases II and III are underway to meet increasing production demands with three (3) and four (4) new cells coming online, respectively. Assemblies are dedicated to particular cells for higher-rate production, while all systems are designed for commonality offering strategic backup capability. Safe operation and equipment density are optimized through the use of electronic safeguards. New time-saving process capabilities allow for one-up drilling, hole inspection, fastening, fastener inspection, and stem shaving.

With the increasing usage of composites for aerodynamic surfaces, the use of bonded composite repair processes are becoming more common. The repair process remains a largely manual process, with repair technicians scarfing or stepping, tracing the plies, fabricating repair patches and finally bonding the patch. The patch fabrication process becomes increasingly tedious and tiring due to cutting and tracing of each individual ply twice for thermal surveying and the final repair patch. We have developed a system that can replace the tracing and cutting components of the fabrication process using low cost, commercial off the shelf (COTS) tools. We present the ply boundary extraction method used and detail the nesting algorithm used to produce the final plies. Our software is benchmarked against the manual process with a list of successfully cut materials using a low cost fabric cutter with a steel drag blade.