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At 23 metres to 33 metres long and up to 2.5 metres wide, the
top wing skins on the Airbus A380 super-jumbo, due to make its maiden flight in
2005, will be the largest components ever produced by the creep-forming process.
The first set of wings was recently completed at the company's site at
Broughton, North Wales.
The tooling to produce these components was designed by South
Yorkshire engineering consultancy Bennett Associates using one of the first
releases of CATIA version 5 developed by Dassault Systhmes. While Airbus itself
had standardised on CATIA version 4, Bennetts opted for version 5 because of its
greater flexibility when handling large quantities of data and its ability to
run customised programmes.
The eight forming tools designed by Bennetts, one for each skin
panel, involve eight heavy-duty steel bases on to which some 280 ribs are
mounted, which produce the finished shape required. This concept allowed a large
proportion of each tool to be manufactured while the final wing designs were
being completed and will also allow any future changes in design and materials
to be accommodated relatively quickly and economically. Each item is about 40
metres long and weighs 50 tonnes.
The wing data supplied by Airbus from which Bennetts had to design
the tooling involved some 500,000 reference points for each surface shape, one
cloud defining the global surface and a second the edges. |
