A safe landing

At Safran Landing Systems’ plant in Mirabel, just north of Montreal, Quebec, the company builds landing gear for Airbus and Boeing commercial airliners. As the world’s largest supplier of landing gear, Safran can meet whatever challenge customers present by using advanced technology solutions to support manufacturing and data gathering. The company has an entire department dedicated to Industry 4.0, working constantly to improve how the company collects and uses the massive amounts of data generated during manufacturing. The company also spends about 7% of its revenue on research and development.

To ensure that every assembly leaving its plant meets stringent customer requirements, Safran has been using Blum-Novotest measuring equipment for years. The company first used Blum lasers to measure and check tools, monitoring length, radius, diameter, and other parameters to prevent crashes and track tool wear. The company also relies on the Blum TC63 CNC touch probe to enhance the precision of workpiece measurement. Safran deployed Blum’s TC64-RG roughness gage to monitor surface finish, a critical parameter in the systems it manufactures.

Overseeing the manufacturing process is the NC Coordinator, Shawn Page, who describes their process for building these landing gear components, “It’s a machining-intensive process, and our customers are very demanding when it comes to precision. Surface finish is critical.”

Growth is good

A couple of years ago the Safran plant in Mirabel was expanded to handle massive new landing gear contracts from Airbus and Boeing, and while growth is good, it can also be a big challenge. Safran needed to ramp up capacity while maintaining its high standards of accuracy and repeatability by introducing more automation into its parts inspection process.

The primary component of each landing gear system starts out as a massive forging, some weighing up to eight tons. Each forging is mounted on a CNC machining center that uses heavy cutters to rough in the shape, imparting a rough finish, bringing the workpiece close enough to final configuration so only a thin layer of metal needs to be removed for a final finish. A second pass removes the layer, bringing the workpiece to the required final finish. The Blum TC64-RG roughness gage is then used to conduct a detailed surface inspection of the finished part. Any irregularities detected will be minor enough to be removed by a final polishing process.

Safran needed to increase automation to handle increased workload, reduce manual processes, and maintain and improve its high-quality control standards. Surface finish inspection was one area where Page needed to cut time, improve accuracy, and increase the number of workpiece surfaces under inspection with fewer operators available. He also wanted to increase the amount of data gathered during production and feed that data back into the production process.

Since surface inspection took place with the finished part still mounted on the machining center, the process cut into the machine’s cycle time and operator time. Ten areas on each part required inspection, taking around 45 minutes, and the accuracy of measurement depended on the operator placing the handheld measuring device correctly. The amount of time required also meant Page was forced to inspect a limited number of surfaces.

When Jamie King, Canadian regional manager for Blum-Novotest, introduced the TC64-RG roughness gage to Page and his team, they were intrigued by its potential to optimize the surface inspection process. After on-site demonstrations and a tour of Blum’s headquarters in Ravensburg, Germany, the decision was made to move forward.

Tailored solutions

Blum works with its customers to tailor solutions, and King took an active role as a resource for Safran throughout the implementation of the TC64-RG. This process included iterative development of custom software to integrate the parts measurement process with Safran’s back-end information technology (IT) systems. With special funding from their parent company, The Safran Group, Page, and his team worked closely with Blum.

With the help of the TC64-RG roughness gage, Page hopes to eliminate human error in the measuring process and anticipates the roughness gage will reduce the inspection time. Page will use time savings doing more robust parts check, inspecting more surfaces. It’s possible to check every tool at the beginning and end of each machining pass so wear and deviation can be spotted and corrected before becoming a problem. In the future, Page plans to migrate this solution to other machines and processes at Safran.

Blum-Novotest Inc.

Safran Landing Systems