One Piece Barrel Fastening

Kawasaki Heavy Industries (Nagoya, Japan) designs and builds the fuselage barrel section #43 of Boeing's 787 Dreamliner. The one-piece-barrel (OPB) fuselage design offered a new challenge to fastening equipment assembly cells. Using conventional methods, a fastening machine built around the roughly 6 meter diameter barrel would be very large, heavy, slow and inaccurate. The solution was to use Electroimpact's EMR technology on two smaller independent post machines with a reduced working envelope offering better speed, reliability and still maintaining the high accuracies required.

Optimizing the working envelope and using EMR technology were pivotal factors in achieving the positioning accuracies required for a reliable fastening process that is maintainable in a production environment and increased access to fastener locations.