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Lay-up is also environmentally sensitive. Bombardier spent a lot of money in trying to locate the Learjet 85 fuselage lay-up process in Mexico, instead of Belf
by dingaling 10y ago
Lay-up is also environmentally sensitive.
Bombardier spent a lot of money in trying to locate the Learjet 85 fuselage lay-up process in Mexico, instead of Belfast in the UK, only to find that the resulting parts were delaminating because the process had been developed for Belfast's climate and sea-level pressure.
Eventually the 85 project was 'suspended', as it remains today. Unfortunately most of the staff at the Querétaro site were laid-off as a result.
- agumonkey 10y agoCrazy, I would never have imagined climate dependant industrial processes.. That said I just saw a talk yesterday about DNA folding and of course trying to replicate the experiment in a different lab caused a tenth of degree variation which voided the whole thing.
- pja 10y agoAir conditioning was invented to try and stabilise the climate in factories to make industrial processes stable & less dependent on the external weather conditions. As well as simply stabilising the temperature, humidity also makes a big difference to some processes. Ireland is a damp place; it doesn’t surprise me that carbon fibre layup didn’t work in the same way in Mexico!
- gsnedders 10y agoAnd with some industrial processes, the tiny variation in barometric pressure within air conditioned sites still causes problems.
- wlll 10y agoClimate is one possible reason (as well as coal deposits) for the rise of the wealth and importance of Manchester, UK in the 1800s. There is a damp atmosphere that makes it great for processing cotton. It's also the where a fairly large printing company has it's central printing facility. Inside the main warehouse over tons of paper a fine mist if intermittently created, keeping the paper malleable. In a less damp environment this misting process might have to be intensified.
- gffrd 10y agoWe see this in plastic extrusion: ambient temperature and humidity play a measurable role in the product that comes off the line, and the process that gets it there. Shift in humidity = adjustment in drying of raw material & tweak to drying time as the product comes off the line = variability in total production time, for example. Surprisingly, as referenced in the Bombardier example, adjusting to ambient environment is often manual/overlooked: it’s trial and error on the manufacturer’s part to make the adjustments necessary.
- eric_the_read 10y agoMy first job out of school was at a company that was (at the time) famous for electronic test equipment. We found that our competitor's probes, developed in a relatively humid area, would trigger when an engineer so much as flicked a lighter in the same cubicle in our much drier climate.
- goatforce5 10y agoSearch for 'Act Fifteen'. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/241/transcript https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/241/... It's a short tale about a sausage factory that moved from an old facility to a brand new state of the factory and discovering their sausages no longer tasted the same, despite using the same ingredients, etc. and how the eventually worked out what the difference was.
- jasonwatkinspdx 10y ago> Crazy, I would never have imagined climate dependant industrial processes.. Depends on the industry. Some, like semiconductor chip manufacturing, go to extreme lengths. One plank of Intel's success is a strategy to measure everything they can, and calibrate every copy of a factory until they all line up. Don't try to figure out every possible causal connection, just control and copy exactly everything you can measure.
- agumonkey 10y agoReproducible tape
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- digler999 10y ago> Unfortunately most of the staff at the Querétaro site were laid-off as a result. Fortunately, the environment wasn't trashed by their capitalist business decisions as a result.