One second, I’m stood at the business end of a Typhoon fighter jet, the pride of the RAF’s fleet, as it goes through the paint shop at BAE Systems’ site in Samlesbury, near Preston. The next, I’ve been transported to the assembly sheds, where the fuselage of an aircraft is lifted into position for final checks.
No, I haven’t discovered the secret of time travel; in fact, I haven’t even left the room. Instead, I’m immersed in BAE Systems’ state-of-the-art virtual reality (VR) suite at the company’s high-tech New Product & Process Development Centre (NPPDC).Samlesbury has long been part of the UK’s aeronautical landscape. Built in the 1920s as an airport for the region, over the years the site has been home to a number of iconic aircraft, including the English Electric Lightning - an example of which stands at the site’s entrance.
Samlesbury’s ‘changing dynamic’
Today, that legacy continues. Samlesbury is responsible for the manufacture of major units for the majority of BAE Systems’ military aircraft, including the front and rear fuselages for the Typhoon. On top of that, the site produces the wings for the Hawk aircraft (most famously used by the Red Arrows display team) and the rear fuselage and fins for the US-led F-35 Lightning II, at the rate of one aircraft per day.
“At a site level we do the complex manufacture for all those programmes,” explains John Dunstan, the NPPDC’s general manager. “They are then shipped to [Samlesbury’s sister site] Warton in the case of Typhoon or Fort Worth in the USA for F-35 final assembly.”
As its name suggests, the NPPDC is where BAE Systems’ latest developments are born. The centre was established in early 2015 to look at ways the company can harness new technologies, including VR. “The whole essence of what we do here is making sure we have an end-to-end future-proof process set up, which can be put straight onto a project and shared across the group,” continues Dunstan.
The reasons for this boil down to the fact that, as part of what Dunstan calls BAE’s ‘future programmes’, the nature of the work at Samlesbury will change in years to come. “Historically we had relatively mainstream programmes like Typhoon running at a relatively steady rate,” he says. “Now we are seeing relatively low-volume batch orders being raised over a longer delivery cycle. As a consequence, that has started to inject a different dynamic into the manufacturing systems we have.”
A knock-on effect of this is reduced influence on the supply chain, continues Dunstan. “The majority of the aircraft supply chain is more interested in the civil market – Airbus, Boeing and the like – which make 50 or 60 planes a month. When we’re only going to be producing about 25 aircraft over the next five years, we have very little leverage with our potential supply chain.
“Added to that, our future programmes look set to be significantly larger in size than what we are producing today. One potential new design is twice the size of the Typhoon, for example. At the sizes we’re looking at, we’ll be competing even more directly for size with the civil market. Without their volumes, we’re never going to get a good place at the supply chain table.”
The role of the NPPDC, then, is to harness up-and-coming technologies as part of a phased ‘roadmap’. Phase one began with a focus on additive manufacturing (see box, right). Phase two, the current step on the roadmap, is where VR comes into play.
A virtual world
Samlesbury’s virtual reality suite is in an unassuming side room at the NPPDC. Even the technology, explains Robert Forrest, visualisation lead at the NPPDC, is in essence, relatively straightforward. “It’s nothing more than most normal conference facilities would have across the country – a computer, a big monitor and a projector,” he says.
This may be simplifying it a bit: there are also half a dozen infrared trackers dotted around the screen (“just like they use in the movies,” Forrest says) and a large-area 3D scanner. Even still, on the face of it, the whole set-up is very simple.
The applications for the technology, however, are anything but. First, Forrest demonstrates how VR can be used by facilities management teams to help plan factory layouts. “Normally, our facilities managers and manufacturing team site down to come up with a 2D drawing of the best layout for the space available,” Forrest explains. “That’s very useful as an initial discussion for how the process flows and how to use the space, but we are able to take that drawing and create a fully interactive 3D environment.”
This has already provided BAE Systems with invaluable assistance in improving their own process flow. With a click of a button, and a bit of rendering time, Forrest transports us to 25 Hangar at Warton, home to the Typhoon final assembly. He points out a platform that surrounds the aircraft as it is being built. “The original 2D design we had for those platforms looked fine in a drawing, but when we got in here we realised they were far too short for what we needed,” he explains. “We didn’t see that on the 2D drawing, and hadn’t even thought to discuss it. We could simply measure how much longer we needed to make them and make any necessary adjustments at the design phase before we spent time and money building it all.
“It takes seconds to move things around in the digital world, and means we can get the factory layout spot on first time. If we, for example, wanted to add another two manufacturing cells to what we already have, it would only take us about 10-15 minutes to drop them into place. When we were designing 25 Hangar, we were unsure about where to put a logistics bay, but when we fired up the VR, it soon became apparent where it should go. We were also able to check that we’d be able to get a finished aircraft out of the hangar – which would obviously be quite a problem.”
Collaborative training
The main advantage of VR, however, is from a training angle. Letting an apprentice loose on a million-pound piece of military hardware could turn into a costly process. Instead, BAE’s trainees use the capabilities of the VR suite to follow a set of instructions.
I was given the chance to put together the tail of a Typhoon using a handset with a laser pointer. “We can turn that pointer into any tool – a drill, for example, or a spanner,” says Forrest. “The trainee then follows a set of instructions to build the part in the correct order by simply picking it up and dropping it into the right place. It’s a fairly simple scenario, but if you’re someone who is technically minded and just needs to get to grips with the process and order of the parts, it’s ideal.”
Forrest is also keen to stress the idea of gamification – the method of using game mechanics to enhance learning and increase engagement. “We want it to look and feel like a video game,” he says. “A class working with this technology is going to be a lot more motivated and interested. On top of that, we don’t have to set up expensive jigs or production cells in a large and busy facility, at least initially.”
This has certainly had an impact on some of BAE’s latest graduates. One, Alastair Dorsett, who is now an engineer in the NPPDC, says that VR was a major reason he chose the company. “If you start somewhere and see you’ll be trained using VR, you’ll think it’s somewhere you want to work,” he explains. “You don’t be sat in a classroom all day, so the variety helps to keep it interesting.”
Dorsett is adamant that ‘digital’ skills are going to become increasingly important for anyone looking to get into manufacturing. “If you have a strong software background, there are more jobs for you in the manufacturing industry than ever before. The VR software has its own scripting language, so knowledge of coding is useful. Someone with a software background would be able to maximise the technology even more than we can already.”
A large investment, but already repaid
This technology has come at quite a cost. Forrest estimates the total outlay as “somewhere in the region of £250,000”, including the cost of the hardware and getting the room built.” On top of that, BAE Systems pay around £10,000 a year in maintenance and support costs, and stumped up almost £100,000 for the 3D scanner.
All this adds up to an eye-watering amount, even for a company with the financial clout of BAE Systems. However, Forrest is adamant that it’s been worth it. “We’ve already had a significant return on that investment,” he says. “We’re currently collaborating on a very large contract, and even if we claimed a small percentage of that, we’d have cleared that initial investment for the room quite easily.”
Andy Levers, technical director of the Virtual Engineering Centre (VEC), a Liverpool-based, European-funded development zone that specialises in the future of engineering, and in particular virtual reality, says that companies are quite often put off by the cost of VR. “If you want a complete cave system, you can quite easily spend a million pounds on that without too much trouble,” he says. However, there are options for those who want to start their VR journey at a slightly lower price. “Headsets that you can get on the high street, such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, are very useful and won’t cost any more than £1,000.”
Time to embrace technology
As manufacturing approaches the fourth industrial revolution, the industry needs to start embracing technology. Convincing cash-strapped manufacturing sites to invest even £1,000 into what some would see as a ‘toy’ is not going to be easy. In MM’s April 2016 issue (http://bit.ly/2wIkwxx), over 90% of manufacturing leaders we surveyed agreed that technology such as VR is vital to staying globally competitive. Despite that, just 13% use tablets and 32% smartphones on the shopfloor. So is the comparatively huge leap into embracing VR too much to ask?
Levers doesn’t think so. “VR is one of what we call the ‘Nine Pillars’ of Industry 4.0,” he says. “We’re seeing more and more interest in everything Industry 4.0-related, not just VR. The main problem is that there is no toolset for a business to know where it is on the digital journey – some may already be doing more than they realise.”
For BAE Systems, this digital journey is a long one, as Dunstan explains. “We are not looking to rush things through for the sake of it. Phases one and two (additive manufacturing and VR) are underway, and we’re starting to think more about intelligent automation and introducing more robotics into our operations. Ultimately, that will lead to the very definition of the ‘factory of the future’ and Industry 4.0 – but it’s a long way off yet. We have to first demonstrate benefits and not just jump on the bandwagon.”
As the NPPDC demonstrates, if it is properly and carefully implemented, VR can have substantial benefits for manufacturers of all sizes. The outlay may be relatively large (although costs are coming down all the time), but the benefits, both from a training and design perspective, cannot be ignored.
The potential of additive manufacturing
The NPPDC is now the home to BAE Systems’ additive manufacturing (3D printing) capabilities. “We used to have additive manufacturing facilities both here and at Warton,” says Dunstan. “This has been consolidated to create a single, multi-discipline team.”
The 1,000sqm, £8m additive manufacturing facility produced around 2,500 3D printed components in 2016 alone. This is just the start of its capabilities, as Kai Burkitt, head of the additive manufacturing programme, explains. “We’re aiming to produce one F-35 per day,” he says. “This is obviously going to cause a lot of wear to the tooling we use. Currently, we spend a lot of time making and replacing the tooling for each product. Additive manufacturing is helping cut that lead time and make our processes more efficient.”
It has also led to products that are both lighter and stronger, which traditional machining methods would never be able to produce – and, says Burkitt, helped bring back obsolete parts that are no longer being produced. “A lot of our older aircraft, especially the Hawk, have a number of components that we no longer have the technical specifications for,” Burkitt explains. “We can produce a 3D scan of a part, put that data into the printer, and make a component that has cost us very little and will fit into the plane perfectly.”
