By Geoff Thomas
With the French Grand Prix little more than two weeks away – and following Lewis Hamilton’s stunning victory on Sunday at Indianapolis – BAE Systems has good reason to cheer the early season success of the Vodafone McLaren Mercedes formula 1 team. The British aerospace company is celebrating 11 years of partnership with Britain’s top motor racing team – and taking lessons from the track straight on to the runway.
British driver Hamilton and his team-mate, reigning world champion Fernando Alonso of Spain, continue to dominate the early stages of the drivers’ world championship, and the McLaren team heads the battle for the constructors’ title.
Behind the scenes, BAE Systems continues to swap skill-sets with the F1 operation as the worlds of competitive motorsport and aerospace move ever closer. McLaren’s success has been hallmarked by its ability dramatically to evolve its F1 cars in engineering terms from race to race, keeping the competition on the back foot and its drivers at the front of the grid. And now some of the lessons learned in terms of rapid engineering at McLaren are being passed back into the aerospace sector where design engineers are adding them to their own skills to produce flying demonstrator aircraft in months not years.
BAE Systems’ unmanned air vehicle (UAV) programme relies heavily on the flexibility, speed and efficiency of rapid engineering and rapid prototyping. And at BAE Systems’ military air solutions headquarters at Warton in north-west England, assessment components for UAVs and Vodafone McLaren Mercedes Formula 1 cars are now coming simultaneously out of stereo lithography UV lasers.
“We are now making around 250 models for the McLaren team each year,” says Gavin Southern, team leader for rapid prototyping at Warton. “The nature of the machinery we use often means that UAV and F1 components are coming out side-by-side so we can optimise the production process.” McLaren sends Gavin and his team 3D CAD data on a regular basis. Once it arrives, the stereo lithography machines are loaded with the data and then precision components are built from epoxy resin, layer by layer, in incredible detail. Three or four iterations may be tried before the perfect result is achieved.
“In the past, such flexibility would have been unheard of,” says Gavin. “You would be talking months of design and engineering work to produce a single component and then you might have to start the process all over again. Today we can simply input revised data and ‘grow’ a new component in the resin vat before the final design is selected.”
Many parts of the F1 cars, including wing tips and gearbox casings, have been produced in component form while at McLaren’s technology centre in Woking, southern England, BAE Systems aerodynamists are constantly on hand to ensure wind-tunnel testing produces the best-possible results.
Source: Flight Daily News
