The Andalusian firm Carbures contributes its 4.0 technology to the improvement of assembly processes for Airbus aircraft parts in one of the two most important aeronautical poles in Spain, the Sevillian. The company specializing in engineering and industrial technology for the manufacture of structures and parts in composite materials has signed a new contract with Airbus, which will provide it with its own technology to speed up the industrial process of manufacturing aircraft structures in the plant that Airbus operates in Tablada, Seville.
The contract has a duration of 10 months and it will be developed, installed and put into operation by a team of engineers that Carbures has in Seville.
This new contract reinforces Carbures as a reference supplier for Airbus in composite materials and process engineering for the manufacture of aircraft structures. In this way, Airbus will replace a manual process, the shaving of rivets, by a robotic process, improving manufacturing times by increasing the speed of the industrial process and the quality of this. The process itself consists of automation with intelligent robots equipped with artificial vision of the polishing method of the rivets that join the structural parts of the aircraft. Currently, it is carried out by means of a manual milling operation and what Carbures has achieved is to replace it with a robotic and automatic process.
The Airbus Tablada plant is a PreFAL that takes out sets for delivery to different Final Assembly Line (FALs), which are final assembly lines. Among these assemblies are: the fuselage of the C295, the horizontal stabilizer (HTP) of the A400M, the caps and pylons for the engines of the A400M, the pole of the MRTT, components of the wing of the Eurofighter, Fan cowls of the A380, rudders of the Boeing 777, flaps and ailerons of the Boeing 737.
Rafael Contreras, President of Carbures, said that “although we are still a growing company, we have been working for years on industrial processes and technologies in composites and the result is that today we have the capacity to provide pioneering and unique industrial solutions in the sector”. For his part, Javier Moreno, General Manager of the Aerospace & Defense Division, added that ” the fact that Airbus relies on Carbures for the development of the automation and robotization of some of its processes is a satisfaction for the recognition that this implies in terms of the technical capacity and experience of the Company in this type of process”.
The shaving robot has been developed within the framework of the MINERVA project (Manufacturing Industrial means Emerging from Validated Automation), with registration number 15/785, which has had an incentive granted by CTA, entirely subsidized by the Ministry of Economy and Knowledge of the Junta de Andalucía and the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.
