Germany’s leading aircraft engine manufacturer—a global player in the design, development, manufacture, marketing and support of commercial and military aircraft engines in all thrust and power categories—has inaugurated a new center of excellence for blade integrated disks (blisks).
MTU’s center of excellence for blisks opened mid April, following a 20-month construction and installation phase. Blisks, which are high-tech components in which the disk and blades form a single part, are increasingly used in modern engine compressors. MTU is among the world’s leading blisk manufacturers.
Most advanced machine pool The center of excellence boasts one of the worlds’s most advanced machine pools including a growing fleet of Mikron Milling machines from GF AgieCharmilles. The 10,000-square-meter shop floor area is available for production. When it is completely up and running, the shop will have 20 milling machines, seven combined turning and milling machines, and eight coordinate measuring machines, allowing MTU to expand its production capacity from 600 blisks per year to as many as 3,500 blisks per year by 2016.
Automated process work-flow concept The Germany’s leading engine manufacturer adapted several high-performance Mikron HPM 800U Milling machines to accommodate MTU’s pallet- and clamping-systems. The shop is designed to house up to 24 Mikron Milling machines as part of MTU’s optimized, automated process workflow system. With one of the world’s largest flexible systems for the production of high- and intermediate-pressure blisks, MTU can manufacture many compressor stages for commercial and military engines. A 96-meter-long main distribution center—connected to a host computer capable of automatically controlling all processes at any time—is the core of the automated process work-flow concept. Every new component will have a routing card, unique order number and an integral radio frequency identification (RFID) chip.
The order number, in combination with data on the availability of fixtures, tools and computer aided programs, will allow the host computer to calculate the workloads of all of the shop’s work stations and allocate components to the available machines through the main distribution system.
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