Made In America: The Under-The-Radar Company That Helps Airplanes Fly
Not too many Americans have ever heard of Electroimpact (EI), of Mukilteo, Washington.
Pretty much every American has heard of Boeing, Airbus, Bombardier, and Embraer, and millions have flown on their airplanes. EI works with all those companies and many more, producing equipment to help them make their airliners.
The company is the brainchild of founder and president Peter Zieve, PhD, who graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the thought, “I’m going to start a company for engineers.”
The company first got its start in riveting. Airliners have lots of rivets that hold the mostly aluminum parts together. The historic method for riveting was to have a worker drill a hole, insert a rivet, and flatten it by hand using a percussive instrument. Hydraulic machines were also used to get the job done, but cleaning up fluid leaks from those machines was done with R-12 refrigerant (Freon), which was found to attack the earth’s ozone layer and was later banned.
Zieve invented an electromagnetic riveting method that he then adapted to large-scale machinery to assemble big aircraft assemblies, such as fastening wing panels to spars. His method was much more precise than the old manual processes and cleaner and quieter than the hydraulic equipment.
Over time, EI improved on their original designs, and became expert at handling the parts to be fastened. Old machines had to contain the airplane section that was being riveted, which became a problem as panels reached 150 feet long. “It became difficult to make a tool large enough to hold the part,” said Erin Stansbury, one of EI’s Mechanical Engineers in the riveting group. EI’s machines use precise positioning tools and sensors to allow the riveter to move around these large parts. They’ve also gotten even more precise, now locating fasteners within 3 to 5 thousandths of an inch tolerance. Manual methods could never achieve this.
Automated riveting is now becoming competitive on smaller assemblies as well, such as doors. Rate and quality improvements helped here, but there’s also the perennial people challenge of an aging and retiring skilled workforce and younger people not wanting to do the work or not having those skills. “The people not showing up to work is a real problem,” said Stansbury.
More precise methods of construction allow designers to reduce the numbers of fasteners required, cutting weight and improving speed and fuel economy. This has been the company’s focus as they’ve partnered with Boeing on the new Max 737 airliner. EI is pushing toward using composite materials. They’re also working towards fully integrated assembly systems, to include not just their advanced riveting and other automation, but also part flows and tooling.
Those latter elements constitute a whole other area of business for EI. Tooling is essentially all the fixtures that hold the many different parts of the aircraft together for assembly. The company produces the jigs, fixtures, molds, carts, and tool bars needed to manufacture complete airliners. “Tooling is not sexy — but it’s critical,” said Patrick Brewer, a Mechanical Engineer working on large tooling capital projects. “It allows us to deliver a better integrated package to our customers.”
The tooling is very specialized, and in the past was always designed for specific applications. It couldn’t easily be reconfigured for use on different aircraft and the tooling design had to trail the aircraft design. Therefore, it’s always been a major player in the schedule. EI has taken this part of the business, which used to take months or years to develop, and accelerated its design dramatically. “Smart tooling allows us to work concurrently. We can now deliver a solution in a fraction of the time after the aircraft design is frozen,” said Brewer.
By using servomotors and advanced sensors, such as laser tracking to provide part position feedback to the “brain” running the automated production system, the company has transformed what used to be fixed, rigid tools into flexible systems that are more easily reconfigured. “Call them positioning systems — they position where we hold the part,” Brewer explained. “We can now use the same tools for multiple airplanes and configurations. [This adaptive tooling] reduces the overall capital cost of equipment, even though the individual tools cost more.”
( See a Boeing video featuring EI’s tooling and other technologies here.)
EI is also a leader in additive manufacturing (AM). The Boeing 787 Dreamliner is the world’s first composite airliner, and EI “decided to make a moon shot and get an offering on this thing,” said Todd Rudberg, the company’s Director of Automated Fiber Placement Business. EI built a prototype AM system that caught the eye of Spirit Aerosystems, which produces a number of 787 parts, including a 40 foot carbon fiber fuselage section. Spirit had been using a different machine to make that particular large part that was a bit like a giant sewing machine, pulling composite threads from large spools. But the machine had to be rethreaded for color changes or line breaks, making it inefficient and overly costly to operate. EI’s machine uses thin strips of carbon fiber that are ½" to 1–1/2" wide and 7 thousandths of an inch thick, and are pre-impregnated with epoxy resin before being deposited in layers to form the shell of the fuselage.
The EI machine’s breakthrough was its modular head — the end effector that facilitates easy switching between the differing carbon fiber strips for different areas of the mold. The greater throughputs and efficiencies this provides took the production time for the carbon fiber fuselage section from 9 to 15 days down to just 3 days.
EI is looking at other applications for this new technology. What started as a giant machine making giant parts is now being reduced in size using smaller industrial robots to make smaller parts with automated fiber placement — things like seat backs, fairings, and tray tables. But this technology is in its infancy. “Fiber placement is still difficult — we’ll struggle to make our equipment good enough,” said Rudberg. “I’m still frustrated.”
EI turns one of the usual domestic manufacturing horror stories on its head — that of overseas production taking American jobs. Their 600 employees (2/3 of them with engineering degrees) produce their machines right there in Washington state, and they export them all over the world. Their equipment is sold not just to their big American customer, Boeing, but to other producers in England, France, Spain, Japan, China, Brazil, and on and on. While they’re opening offices in other countries to manage distant business relationships, they count their U.S. production as a strength. “All our machines are engineered to order,” said Ben Hempstead, EI’s Chief of Staff. They produce very costly machines in very small numbers. “Once, we got an order for ten, and it blew our minds,” Hempstead said. “It’s efficient to have our engineers do most of the work, because they refine the machines as they go, updating the earlier machines to the new standards as they’re developed.”
Hempstead added, “Our desire isn’t to be the cheapest — it’s to be the best.”
