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Increased production requirements for the Airbus family of planes, caused Aerospatiales Aircraft Division at Nantes to implement a new automated system. Used for central wing box assembly, this system is called TOPASE. Value analysis was performed to optimize assembly and production schedules. A simulation was performed to identify resource allocation in all workshops based on schedule demand for A320, A330/340 and A321 assemblies. The fundamental principle of this system is to create a homogeneous production flow with no bottlenecks. At the same time, equipment utilization must be maximized to optimize production cost and provide acceptable profits. TOPASE today has a series of identical C.N.C. machines each capable of complete panel assembly in one operation. This includes installation of rivets, double headed slug rivets and two piece fasteners.

The Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) is a European Space Agency autonomous, expendable logistic transportation system for Low Earth Orbit. The ATV will be launched by Ariane 5 and its mission is to contribute to the logistic servicing of the International Space Station: via the delivery of a cargo (crew items, scientific experiments, spare parts..) as well as of fluids such as propellant, water and compressed air via the provision of an extra service consisting of retrieving the station wastes when departing (replacing the upcoming cargo) and getting rid of them through the final destructive atmospheric re-entry of the ATV itself via the contribution to the orbit control of ISS by providing a reboost and attitude control capability to the ISS. The ATV consists of a Spacecraft and an Integrated Cargo Carrier. The Spacecraft includes all subsystems necessary for the automated flight to the ISS and for the reboost, including the propellant tanks and the thrusters.

This paper presents the last developments which have been performed at SABCA under internal funding, and the application of this work on the Technological Telecommunication Satellite STENTOR. The High Performance Capillary Pumped Loop ( HPCPL ) has been defined to get a reliable operation mode under a very wide range of operation conditions. Preliminary results have been already presented (ref. (1)), showing the high performances and the reliable functional characteristics of the HPCPL. The present paper emphasises the last developments which have been performed at SABCA.

FLUIDNET-G is a “workstation” based graphic's orientated software package, developed by AEROSPATIALE under a C.N.E.S. contract on joint funding. The package performs single phase fluid loops thermal and hydraulic preliminary design. The main characteristics of this tool are: the user friendliness of the graphic's and the workstation concept. the “upstream compatibility” towards others analysis tools (FLUINT, ESATAN, …) This paper illustrates an application for which FLUIDNET-G has increased engineer performance to perform trade-offs and sensitivity studies in the frame of the preliminary thermal and hydraulic design of HERMES spaceplane.

One way to increase thermal software performance has been developed at AEROSPATIALE Cannes by means of a condensation algorithm for conductive models (EQUIVALE). The benefit of this improvement is exportable to other software packages by developing specific interfaces. Therefore, two gateways are now available to perform ESATAN conductive models condensation: the first (ESAEQU) translates the initial ESATAN input deck into the different files required by EQUIVALE; the second (EQUESA) generates a new ESATAN input deck including the equivalent conductances provided by EQUIVALE. Three examples of application are described hereafter: the first (RADIATOR PANEL) illustrates the condensation processing coupled to ESATAN, the second (TV-SAT/TDF), more realistic, refers to a flight model in the frame of the AEROSPATIALE Thermal Software environment and the third (TÜRKSAT) shows the optimum use of EQUIVALE with the combination of both PLATEAU and EQUIVALE software packages.