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Material whirl sends 7E7 work from Japan back to area plant

By Dominic Gates
Seattle Times aerospace reporter

STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES Dale Campbell winds a portion of carbon-fiber fabric from a finished roll. Campbell is in charge of rewinding and visual inspection of finished product at Toray Composites America in Frederickson, which is supplying material for the 7E7.

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Gov. Gary Locke will headline a groundbreaking ceremony today to mark the beginning of a modest expansion as Toray Composites America gears up to supply the materials for the 7E7's tail fin.

The Toray factory, set up specifically to service Boeing's Frederickson plant nearby, produces the composite raw material, a fusion of plastics and carbon fiber, from which the 7E7 will be built.

The material made here will go not only to Boeing but also to its global partners on the 7E7 program — including Mitsubishi Heavy Industries back in Japan.

	STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES Moriyuki Onishi, chief executive of Toray Composites America, is surrounded by the creel machine that holds bobbins of carbon fiber that will be used in composite materials for the Boeing 7E7.

The advanced-materials sector represents only about 6 percent of revenues for Toray's Japanese parent company, textile and chemical conglomerate Toray Industries. But it's growing fast.

"It is considered by the corporation the strategic business of the future," said Moriyuki Onishi, president and CEO of Toray Composites America.

Toray has about 180 employees in Frederickson, working in four shifts around the clock seven days a week. In the next few years, it plans to add 100 more or so jobs in anticipation of increased production.

That expanded capacity will service a growing market for carbon-fiber composites, a raw material used to build not only airplane structures but also golf-club shafts, fishing rods and other products that require both lightness and toughness.

In the early 1990s, Toray won the sole supplier contract to provide composites used to make the tail of Boeing's 777 jet. As part of the deal, it agreed to transfer the technology and build a plant in Frederickson beside Boeing's facility.

Composites What are composites? The advanced composites used in modern aerospace applications are a blend of plastic and carbon fiber. Carbon fiber impregnated with toughened epoxy resin is formed into rolls of tape or fabric and kept refrigerated to suspend hardening. How do rolls of tape become an airframe structure? Computer-controlled robot arms lay the tape over a tool shaped precisely as the core of the structure. To create a fuselage section, for example, the tape is laid across a barrel-shaped tool. When baked in a high-pressure oven, the material hardens.

The proximity allows the airplane maker to reduce its raw-material inventory and its refrigerated storage and retrieval costs, said Bill Benjamin, an industry consultant and president of Composite Market Reports.

"[Boeing Frederickson] can almost pick up the phone and plan on receiving it in two days," said Benjamin.

It's a deal that has also worked out well for Toray and for Washington.

With the 7E7, Boeing decided to push far beyond what it did on the 777. Most of the primary aircraft structure will be made of composites, not aluminum.

That's about half the airplane's weight, compared with 12 percent composites by weight on the 777.

Airbus' forthcoming A380 superjumbo jet will have about 25 percent composites.

"Good strategy"

"A supplier wants to get in on the ground floor and grow with the business," said Charles Seaton, director of the state's Materials & Process Development Center. "It's clear composites is going to continue to be a more and more important part of the new generation of aircraft. It's a good strategy."

During last year's scramble to win final assembly of the 7E7, the state set up Seaton's center to enhance the region's expertise in composites.

The center, affiliated with the community colleges in Everett and Edmonds, is devising a curriculum for composites repair. It will also set up workshops to teach local companies the skills necessary to work with these materials.

Sticky floors, cold rooms

Toray's process begins with a viscous epoxy resin that's mixed in a container not unlike a machine for pulling taffy.

In the preparation room, shoes stick lightly to the gluey floor. "[The resin] sticks to everything," said Toray's director of operations, Mark Burggren, as he showed off the facility.

Once mixed, the resin is kept very cold, about -10º F, to suspend chemical hardening.

From the cold room, trays of resin with the consistency of frozen cake icing are brought out to be melted and applied in a thin film to coat broad sheets of brown paper.

Meanwhile, hundreds of bobbins of thick, black carbon-fiber thread unwind and feed into a machine that lays them together to form a continuous sheet of carbon fiber.

The epoxy-coated paper and the sheet of carbon threads come together under a heated plate, and the resin is pressed into the fiber.

This is essentially the end product. Blades slice it into various widths of slate-gray tape. It could be mistaken for a roll of duct tape.

Computer systems collect data constantly on the process. The exact thickness of the epoxy film on the paper is monitored with lasers.

To comply with Federal Aviation Administration certification requirements, samples of the end product are taken aside, hardened in small ovens, then tested to destruction.

Cold storage

The tape leaves Toray vacuum-wrapped and is kept refrigerated until the customer has formed the material into a structure.

Across the road in Frederickson, Boeing builds up 777 tail structures using a computer-controlled robotic arm that sweeps back and forth, applying 6inch-wide lengths of tape layer upon layer to form a laminated surface.

This is hardened by heating to 350º F in a high-pressure oven, creating a rigid material lighter and tougher than metal.

In 1916, Boeing began building airplanes out of wood and fabric. Almost 90 years later, aluminum airplanes are going the way of the wooden ones. Fabric is back.

Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or dgates@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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