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The fast growth of air traffic and the need for lighter and more fuel efficient aircraft is driving the ramp-up of important new aircraft programs. These increases in production rates are driving manufacturers to seek out robust and reliable installation systems. They must also adapt to the unique requirements of composite materials that now have an increasingly important place in the aerospace industry. Moreover, environmental constraints continue to evolve and drive new regulations, such as REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals) in Europe. As an example, this regulation is leading to the adoption of non-chromate surface treatments and paints for most applications. The legacy generation of fasteners does not comply with all of these new requirements.

With air traffic demand constantly increasing and several years of aircraft production in their backlog, major aircraft manufacturers are now shifting their focus toward improving assembly process efficiency. One of the most promising solutions, known as “One Side Assembly”, aims to perform the whole assembly sequence from one side of the structure (drilling, temporary fastener installation and removal, blind fastener installation, assembly control) and with a high level of integrated automation. Investments in robotic equipment, automation engineering and innovation are very active and automation capabilities have already increased a lot in the aerospace industry. As an example, drilling operations for large dimensions airframe are clearly moving from manual to automated. However, despite more and more clever and sophisticated robotics, the use of historical fasteners with two side installation method remains a strong limitation to innovative automated assembly sequences.

This paper describes the development and application of new self-removable temporary fasteners for orbital junction. These low size temporary fasteners made of aluminum are easily automatically destructible by drilling and have been deployed into our automatic robot on final assembly line. The major benefit of these new temporary fasteners is then the possibility to be integrated into an automatic assembly process. The R&D team of the Final Assembly Line unit at Airbus - Toulouse, has conducted this project in cooperation with LISI Aerospace.