Boeing 787 Dreamliner - Mark Wagner [43]
PREPARING FOR PRODUCTION
By mid-2004 Boeing prepared to start transitioning all its preproduction and test work to its manufacturing partners. “We are now focusing on how to transfer all that into the 7E7 configuration, and how we translate it into specific parts of the wing and fuselage in manufacturing,” said Al Miller, who at the time was Boeing’s 7E7 director of technology integration and later became director of advanced technology.
The first one-piece contoured barrel (OPCB) test section was completed at the end of 2004, after which it was used to develop and test techniques for cutting out windows and doors, as well as painting processes. The structure also was used to verify overall integrity and featured several new design aspects, such as integral frames, stringers, and shear ties. Other test barrels were used to prove out production techniques, in particular, the potentially difficult process of detaching the cured fuselage structure from its supporting mandrel. Despite several issues (see chapter 9), the test sections more than proved their worth.
A similar test piece for the wing was meanwhile being made by a joint team from Boeing, Fuji, and Mitsubishi. Measuring approximately seventeen feet from the front to rear spar and fifty feet from the aircraft centerline to the tip, the half-span box section represented a portion of a representative full-scale wing. Four feet deep at the thickest section, the unit weighed 55,000 pounds, including test-only hardware and instrumentation. Mike Bair said the tests would help determine the basic strength of the structure. He added, “the tests we are running will help us to verify the analytical methods we have used to calculate the loads that the structure will have to carry.”
While tests continued through 2005 and early 2006, frantic building activity took place at the global partner sites as they hurried to get into position to meet Boeing’s production plan. A huge focus for activity was around the Japanese port city of Nagoya, where Fuji, Kawasaki, and Mitsubishi were all investing heavily in 787 production facilities.
Fuji’s new West Handa plant housed composite fabrication for its 787 wing center box work, while assembly was performed in a newly erected 48,000-square-foot building in nearby Handa. “We decided to make a new plant here at Handa closer to the final shipping port,” said Fuji 787 Program Manager Yasuhiro Toi. The composite fabrication site, covering a floor area of about 29,500 square feet, housed a French-made Forest Line high-speed automated layup machine, water jet trimming and drilling machine, and nondestructive inspection (NDI) machines.
To verify the analytical models used to design the composite wing box, Boeing planned a special full-scale structural test in addition to the standard series of structural evaluations, culminating in the static and fatigue rig tests. Together with Fuji and Mitsubishi, engineers created a portion of the wing weighing 55,000 pounds and measuring 50 feet long and 18 feet wide at its broadest chord point near the root. The wing was all composite, with the exception of monolithic aluminum ribs, and a test of the wing to 150-percent ultimate load (completed in November 2008) revealed the need for design tweaks.
Aluminum side-of-body ribs are prepared at Fuji for integration with composite front and rear spars, skins, and spanwise stiffening members in the wing center box. The completed unit, known as Section 11, measured 17.4 feet long (fore to aft) by 19 feet wide by 4 feet deep. Mark Wagner
Sophisticated robotic automatic guided vehicles (AGV) chimed favorite Japanese karaoke tunes as they glided across the factory floor carrying immense sections from stage to stage. In the relatively quiet atmosphere of a composite factory (as opposed to the deafening rivet-gun cacophony