Robots enter production of carbon fiber composite aerostructures at Terma

Grenaa, Denmark - The production of aerostructures in carbon fiber and composites for the F-35 program at Terma in Grenaa is about to be automated. This will strengthen the company's international competitiveness.

Automation is the objective of the three-year development project FlexDraper which Terma has initiated in collaboration with Danish firm  RoboTool, University of Southern Denmark SDU), Aalborg University (AAU), Technical University of Denmark (DTU), and the Dutch NLR – Netherlands Aerospace Centre.

"One of our biggest challenges in the production of aerostructures in carbon fiber is that a large part of the manufacturing process is manual," explains Jesper Freltoft, Vice President, Manufacturing Engineering at Terma Aerostructures in Grenaa. Terma manufactures a variety of parts in carbon fiber  composites for the U.S. F-35 fighter aircraft.

"With financial support from the Innovation Fund Denmark we have established a technology center at our production facility, where we are testing a range of technologies that are necessary to develop robots and automated production technology. We expect to achieve a significant reduction in the total production time in large parts of our current production. This will truly strengthen Terma’s international competitiveness in the production of aerostructures, said Jesper Freltoft.

“As an initial  resultTerma successfully passed the Proof-of-Concept milestone for the FlexDraper project aiming at fully automated hyper flexible “Pick & Drape” capability for high mix/low volume prepreg lay-up”

Terma has been a supplier to the F-35 program since 2004 and is supplying composite aerostructures and radar electronics for the program.