It boasts a 15-foot, three-dimensional projector screen, software that can build a digital factory on a computer and one of the most advanced laser labs in the country.
Its goal: find innovative ways for Nutmeg State manufacturers to streamline factories, increase profits and keep much-needed parts for aerospace equipment made by stateside companies.
Called the National Center for Aerospace Leadership (NCAL), the building in East Hartford on the Pratt & Whitney campus is more or less a laboratory. The center serves as the headquarters of an ambitious program by the Air Force known as the National Aerospace Leadership Initiative, an effort to apply advanced research in supply chain management to the suppliers who build and assemble widgets and parts for the military’s planes.
Broad Partnership
NALI, administered by the Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology, comprises two other major partners in its goals. One, the Springfield, Ohio-based Advanced Virtual Engine Test Cell Inc. (AVETeC), is a private firm with a specialty in using computers to model and commercialize research in propulsion systems. The other, Johnstown, Pa.-based Concurrent Technologies Corp. (CTC), is a private firm with an expertise in supply chain management consulting.
The three main partners will work with a variety of colleges, universities, government and industry organizations to find ways to improve the area’s manufacturing workforce, and assist manufacturers in leaning their businesses.
Although Congress established and initially funded the NALI program in late 2004, it’s only really come on line within the last year.
In late May, the center got its first full-time director: Robert E. Mansfield Jr., a former Air Force Brigadier General who specialized in supply chain management and had been working to set up logistics for the $270 billion Joint Strike Fighter program, the largest defense procurement in American history.
The opportunity to head up the center “struck home” with him, Mansfield said. “Our manufacturing base, particularly in defense, is having a real hard time. There’s a lot this kind of program can do.”
Innovation Incubator
Mansfield’s vision for the center is to turn East Hartford into a test site for technology that would easily transfer into the hundreds of small manufacturing companies that dot Connecticut, allowing them to more easily, quickly and profitably build parts for Pratt & Whitney, Boeing and other major aerospace companies, as well as work with those companies to refine their engines and other technology.
Mansfield’s got big plans for Connecticut and a big budget to work with — about $16 million a year through 2012 — although he insists “there’s no need to spend money quickly.”
Much of that work that will be done in the center will be on computers, rather than on the shop floors of factories.
Using special software, the center can build a virtual factory that mimics the exact machines on a shop floor, the movement of workers within that factory and the time it takes to build any item the factory manufactures.
It can then move those items around, change their order and tweak the virtual factory to run at peak efficiency. The modeling and simulation unit, said manager Thomas W. Scotton, will play a major role in helping manufacturers plan which machines to use or buy, and how to set up their factories.
The center also uses software that can refine and speed up the computer code used in CNC machines and other equipment inside of factories, and find out how to shorten cycle times — the length of time it takes to a machine to make a single piece.
“We can build years worth of a product in matter worth of minutes,” Scotton said. “It’s especially important for companies that are building items made of expensive material like titanium. This way, someone needn’t waste $300,000 worth of material to see how best to improve their cycle times.”
Lasers are another key venture for NCAL. Inside its laser lab, applications engineer Steve Maynard is finding the best machines and methods for drilling and cutting out materials that are used to make the hollow blades inside of turbine engines. Maynard said that the center has developed a new technology using acoustics and better measure when lasers cut through these pieces with unusually shaped holes.
