Digital Thread Ensures Invention Works as Designed
"We are providing lightweight, high-performance composite structures, the disadvantage being that composites materials in their raw form are generally more expensive than their metal counterparts," he says. "In order to compete with metals, we have to be highly automated in our manufacturing process."
The old way of building aircraft stiffeners involved manual labor. It can take tens to hundreds of layers of composite material to create stiffeners, the layers being similar to reinforced tape. Technicians would lay strips of the material down over a mold and carefully massage them down to get the material to conform to the correct shape without any bridging, wrinkles or distortion among the layers. It was painful and time consuming.
To address those costly manual problems, Benson and his team invented an automated stiffener forming (ASF) process. Now, an ASF machine makes those stiffeners automatically; laminating, forming and compacting the layers to remove any bulk.
"It’s a fully automated process where we have a digital thread in a computer-controlled machine," he says. "The computer knows when to start and stop to apply the plies. It dispenses the right material to the right location, and then all of the forming systems are programmed to actuate and land at the right place at the right time to form and compact the material as it is applied to the tool."
As a seasoned mechanical engineer holding multiple patents, Benson has made a longstanding impact on the aerospace industry.
"It's a privilege and an honor to be named as a Northrop Grumman fellow," he says. "The role of a fellow is problem solving, intellectual property creation and capture, mentoring of engineers and the industry, and providing vision for new business opportunities."
