Aircraft skin is a layer of skin that covers the body of an aerospace vehicle. Specifically, on aircraft, skin is a thin-walled metal alloy or composite component wrapped around the aircraft frame structure.
The aircraft skin has ulta-thin curved walls and complex shapes, with the thinnest part being only a few millimeters.
The technology of finely carving an aluminum alloy plate into aircraft skin is only owned by three companies worldwide, with Chinese companies being one of them.
How to make the skin and bottom of the box thin enough requires the use of mirror milling technology, which is the core process of mirror milling technology.
The mirror milling technology developed by SHTP adopts a dual five axis ten linkage control method when processing aircraft skin or rocket box bottom. The support side five axis carries multiple sensors and support heads, which play a real-time measurement and support role on the workpiece. The milling side five axis carries a spindle and specialized tools, which perform thinning processing on the workpiece, controlling the processing characteristics and accuracy.
The support side and milling side are always in a synchronous state during the movement process, just like the image in a mirror. The actions of the two are completely consistent, which requires high control accuracy of the machine tool.
This synchronous mirror milling ensures the lightweight processing of the skin and box bottom. The SHTP mirror milling technology can even process the thinnest workpiece thickness, which is almost as thin as an eggshell.
After milling is completed, over 90% of the weight of the original workpiece will be removed and inspected to be qualified before it can be finally installed on airplanes and rockets.
The real-time ultrasonic dynamic thickness measurement and closed-loop control technology developed by SHTP for tracking the normal direction of workpieces improves the thickness measurement accuracy by four times compared to international standards,The minimum wall thickness range that can be processed has been increased by 30%, and the wall thickness accuracy has been increased by 5 times, meeting the needs of high-precision manufacturing of ultra-thin aircraft skin.