Pratt & Whitney's High-Tech Innovations
"What we're doing here at Pratt & Whitney with our investments is all about how we can invest more development technology to improve the process repeatability, process capability and overall quality of the components that go into our engines," Di Perna said.
To do so, he explained, the company has defined a tight work process around new technologies to help it innovate and experiment with new technologies and new tools like 3-D engineering and rapid prototyping.
In the aerospace industry, however, such experiments are not taken lightly.
"Our goal is to get first time quality right out of the gate," Di Perna said. "To get there, we put technology at the forefront of our investments, but first we put new technologies through a technology maturation process so we can develop them and get them ready for prime time."
"The idea is to take what is just in the universities, what is proven as a concept and bring it in, try to prove it and apply it to our type of components," explained Donald McIntosh, senior fellow of Manufacturing Technology at Pratt & Whitney Canada.
As the company introduces new products or looks for way to improve the legacy products like the F135, he said, those technologies that pass muster in their technology incubators quickly become critical to the manufacturing process.
"The way we start out is with the concept of intelligent manufacturing," he explained. "Intelligence is about knowing, it’s about understanding, it's about an ability to adapt and react to things."
Employing new emerging technologies, he said, is the only way to increase that level of understanding and keep driving continuous improvement.
The effects of that process are echoing through the Pratt & Whitney plants across the world.
"You can see how it has changed the shop floor for our operators," noted Mike Pcholinski, vice president of Development Operations at Pratt & Whitney.
"You go back a while and we had gauges and our coordinate measuring machines," he said. "Now we're more into 3-D scanning system, which gives us a lot more information about parts, about the quality of parts, the signature of parts, where they're targeted very quickly."
Simply, he added, "we have more options these days and we can carry those options quicker and better on a global scale."
