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Automated Fiber Placement (AFP) equipment has been developed capable of laying fiber in excess of 2000 inches per minute on full-size, complex parts. Two such high-speed machines will be installed for production of a nose section for a large twin-aisle commercial aircraft fuselage at Spirit AeroSystems in Wichita, Kansas along with a rotator for the fuselage mandrel. The problem of cutting and adding on the fly at these speeds requires thorough re-evaluation of all aspects of the technology, including the mechanical, controls, servos systems, and programming systems. Factors to be considered for high speed cut and add on the fly are discussed.

The A380 aircraft is the largest passenger aircraft ever built and an appropriate machine was required to accomplish the fastening of the wing plank to stringer and buttstrap joints. The lower wing panels are curved along the length and move 1.42m out of plane. All previous E4000 machines had clampup heads that would extend and retract whatever distance was required to contact the wing panel. To improve toolpoint alignment, Electroimpact added a Z-axis that moves the yoke in order to reduce the necessary travel envelope of the clamp table axes and to cause them to clamp in the same plane regardless of panel position along the Z-axis.

Automated Floor Drilling Equipment (AFDE) have been used at Boeing for drilling floor panel, galley, lavatory and other holes in Boeing planes. New controller and drill spindle designs made it possible to redesign the AFDE as a self-contained unit with on-board CNC, custom operator interface, RF network and more compact drill spindles for increased robustness and versatility.

Boeing needed a process to replace hand drilling for floor panel holes and galley and lavatory mounting locator holes in the floor grid of the completed 737 fuselage. Electroimpact developed a process, and the 737 AFDE machine, that is a substantial improvement over existing technology. It provides full CNC control, quick reconfiguration of hole patterns, fast drilling of up to 3000 holes in one 8-hour shift, drills both titanium and aluminum and works inside the fuselage.

Two Automated Electromagnetic Riveting Assembly Cells (AERAC) were manufactured for Textron Aerostructures by Electroimpact, Inc. The AERAC installs the final rivets in the A330/A340 upper wing panel in the floor assembly jig. At Textron for each wing the corresponding floor assembly jigs for each wing are lined up end to end. An operating procedure in which the formboards are removed in bays allows efficient operation of an in the jig riveter such as the AERAC. Specialized machine codes developed for the AERAC allows quick fully programmed stringer to stringer jumps of the stringer side offset tooling. The AERAC is programmed entirely from a CATIA drawing of the part. Of the 5 axes of rivet data available only two are retained for use by the AERAC.