Use case Rocket tanks in series: The digital twin makes it possible

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FAULHABER Drive Systems

Taiwan Machine Tool & Accessory Builders' Association (TMBA)

In the pre-development and qualification of a manufacturing process for Ariane 6 series production, MT Aerospace AG relies on software from Nebumind. This allows for a faster understanding of process-relevant influencing factors and reduces the necessary test series for qualification.

Caroline Albert is CEO and Co-Founder of Nebumind. Nina Backes works as Senior Communications Manager at MT Aerospace.

This case specifically involves a metallic, incremental forming process. With it, parts of the tank for the Ariane 6 carrier rocket are created. The preparation and visualization of the manufacturing data in the Nebumind software offers MT Aerospace the opportunity to gain new insights about influencing factors and interrelationships more quickly, to abort unsuccessful attempts earlier, and to optimize the right process parameters more quickly. The introduction of the new process could be shortened by at least six months.

Challenging forming.

As a subsidiary of the space and technology group OHB SE, MT Aerospace also develops and produces key components for the European carrier rocket Ariane 6, including components for the tanks. Metal sheets are brought into the desired shape in a complex, highly automated forming process.

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The complex forming process has been adapted for the series production of Ariane 6. The pre-development and qualification of a new manufacturing process in space travel is extremely laborious - both in terms of time and resources.

The manufacturing process is evaluated in a test phase: experiments are carried out, the results are analyzed, settings are changed, and correlations between several influencing factors are investigated. Data is already being collected in this phase, processed in Excel spreadsheets and analyzed with specially programmed macros. However, these macros reach their limits with increasing amounts of data and later also lead to high maintenance effort for the tool.

MT Aerospace also faced this challenge when introducing the new forming process and, with this manual approach, expected an implementation time of several years – time that would have tied up capacities on the one hand and could not have withstood the tight schedule of the Ariane 6 on the other.

Digital twin of the real manufacturing data.

With the promise of delivering faster insights through the processing and visualization of manufacturing data, Nebumind accompanied both the pre-development and qualification of the new manufacturing plant. The software already supported the connection of robots and sensors and the automated data collection.

Thus, during the first test runs of the new forming system, manufacturing data, such as machine speed, the kinetic energy introduced and the resulting geometry or forming, were recorded and calculated. They were then visualized in the software as a digital twin of the manufactured component. As a result, the kinetic energy introduced and the resulting deformation could be linked and an automated option for optimizing the process parameters could be found.

After the pre-development, the software also played a central role in the qualification of the process in order to analyze its stability and to provide evidence of whether the parameters are maintained. These values will continue to be monitored with the Nebumind software in the future in order to keep the process stable.

The automated data collection, processing, and structured provision is an ideal basis for machine learning, which will continuously optimize the process in the next step.