A breakthrough in handheld Smart Drilling Units : Material detection with advanced electrical drilling

The quality requirement for drilling operation in aerospace industry associated to the different material layers of the recent aircraft design is one of the most challenging issues for manufacturing engineers who want to design system for one-shot drilling operation. We have developed and validated in production a handheld electrical tool which is able to accurately monitor the drilling parameter and to adjust the drilling conditions to specific material in the stack-up. This “Smart Driller” achieves quality and performances equivalent to those obtained by the most advanced heavy automated drilling systems at a small portion of weight and cost. This Smart Driller has been developed to secure the quality in the drilling operation in multilayer stack-ups, such as Carbon Fiber/Titanium, Stainless Steel/Aluminum, … Some highlights: • Full electrical low voltage • Fully Autonomous with on board NC • High power light weight • Automatic sensing of material changes • Peck drilling • Tool break and wear detection • Real time quality monitoring • Optimized cycles The Technical Paper will present the technical solution which permit to achieve the high tolerance requirements for diameter 11mm in Stainless Steel/Aluminum/ Stainless Steel stack-up of 45mm in one shot with accurate measurement of the each layer. For that purpose, our “Smart Driller” integrates advanced technologies such as: • Miniaturized high power motor controllers with fully NC device • Mechanical design with use of titanium to optimize strength vs. weight. This very advanced Smart Driller will offer to the aerospace manufacturing big savings in their quality assurance environment. These savings include cycle time reduction, productivity increase, high quality achievement, low investment. This equipment is a real breakthrough in aerospace industry.