GKN opens wing components manufacturing facility

Located outside Bristol, the Western Approach facility will be used to manufacture and assemble carbon-fibre-reinforced wing components. The £170m facility currently employs 300 staff but this is expected to rise to 450 by 2016.

Made up of two buildings with a total floor space of 30,000m², the facility is already engaged in the manufacture of components for the Airbus A350 XWB and A400M.

The first building — operating at between 10°C and 21°C ambient with 40–50 per cent humidity — contains the composites manufacturing operation where automated fibre placement (AFP) machinery supplied by M Torres is currently applying 7–10kg of material an hour to the A350’s rear wing spars.

The steerable, automated tape-laying process can simultaneously apply 16 tows to the spar and improves on-hand lay-up rates of around 1kg per hour.

The second building houses a ‘moving line’ assembly operation that uses RHC Lifting’s automated guided vehicles to move the wing structures to different manufacturing processes in the facility.