In Carbures,we have spent years investing in innovation and technological developments of our own. This is the business strategy that we have followed since our foundation and that has allowed us to grow as a company and diversify our business through our own technology. This positions us as a 4.0 Industry reference in those sectors in which we operate. A new robotic project that comes to join that line in our aeronautical area has been the AIRUNION. It has been the 2015 call of the Innterconecta Technological Fund (European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), which was composed by the Center for Industrial Technological Development (CDTI), in a consortium formed together with Airbus Operations, Titania, Sertec Engineering and our division of Aerospace & Global Defense.
The project set a series of goals that the robot needed to meet; minimization of industrial costs, structures weight reduction and greater customer satisfaction due to an improvement in the reliability and availability of fast on-site repairs. For the development of the AIRUNION robot, an automated system has been used for surface preparation prior to repairs in composite-composite joints of commercial aircraft structures.
The results obtained in the automatic sanding operation using a dual robotic arm system are ideal: it has been possible to reduce operation time to 11 minutes, almost half than those managed by the previous system. The repair time savings and the process automatization are the main technological improvements offered by this robot compared to the manual repair process that was followed until now. Currently the sanding process is manual, it also takes about 20 minutes to be ended. The main difficulty in this type of operation is the precision at which the piece must be sanded, with a depth of about 0.235 millimetres.
Carbures keeps on betting and working on this kind of projects to promote the complete digitalization and automatization of the value chain through the integration of data processing technologies, intelligent software, robots and sensors, including suppliers and customers as throughout the production process to be able to predict, control, plan and produce more intelligently.
