Site news 17.10.2011On October, 20th 2011 in the frame of celebrating the company’s 95th anniversary, the main site of NPO Saturn in Rybinsk (Yaroslavl Region) saw inauguration of several new modern production facilities and laying of the first stone at a new production shop construction site.
The re-equipment of a company along with mastering new disruptive technologies – is the main approach using which the company solves the questions of its market competitiveness. A system-based approach in dealing with production upgrade is a guarantee to optimize investments related to purchasing new state-of-the-art equipment, cutting down costs and increasing the company’s profitability.
The dynamics of transformations ongoing at NPO Saturn is tremendously intensive. In the course of the last two years the company refurbished and commissioned the following facilities: machining and assembly shop №32, assembly shop №22 dedicated to industrial and marine gas-turbine engines, specialized shop №34 for machining blades and nozzle guide vanes of the SaM146 engine low-pressure turbine – it has also become the ODK competence center under the name “Turbine blades”. Casting production of turbine blades located in shop №722 has been revamped, assembly shop №80 has been overhauled and re-equipped to enable production of 10 – 15 SaM146 engines a month. Reconstruction of shop №154, dedicated to the SaM146 engine repair operations, has entered its final stage.
Today, on October, 20th 2011 a comprehensive anodizing line of shop №9 has been put into operation.
In parallel to constructing new production shops, the company carries out the upgrade of its existing production facilities. Shop №9 specialized in galvanic coatings serves as a good example of such upgrading.
Previously when the company started pilot production of new engines, the galvanic shop of NPO Saturn had over 15 new processes of chemical and electro-chemical treatment installed in it for working with over 250 types of parts. However the obsolete equipment installed in the shop no longer met the requirements for processing parts for newly designed engines and couldn’t be used in their serial production.
In order to enable serial production of newly developed engines and certify special processes to comply with international standards, it was decided to purchase and install in the existing galvanic coatings shop five full-cycle galvanic lines. The galvanic line specifications were sent to the leading Russian companies specializing in production of galvanizing equipment and to the Russian offices of some foreign companies. After carefully analyzing the received proposals to supply galvanizing equipment, NPO Saturn chose Aquacomp Hard, a Czech company, one of Europe’s leading companies in design and fabrication of galvanizing equipment. Aquacomp Hard carried out installation of five automatic lines. These lines will considerably increase the quality of produced parts due to stability of process modes and exclusion of the human factor effect; substantially reduce the amount of manual labor and impact of adverse factors on the maintenance staff; reduce by more than twice the amount of waste water and increase the level of air pollutant cleaning up to 99,5%; drastically reduce costs of the equipment running maintenance and overhaul.
Today, on October 20th 2011 a new production area №43 dedicated to electrical discharge machining of compressor blades within shop 119 has been put into operation.
On the day of celebrating the 95th anniversary of NPO Saturn, the company launched a new area №43 within the production facility 119 which is planned to be subsequently transformed into a specialized end-to-end production line dedicated to electrical discharge machining for profiling the airfoil of compressor blades.
The technological field of compressor blades production championed by NPO Saturn – from designing production processes and manufacturing purpose-oriented equipment and production tooling to the ability to produce gas-turbine engine compressor blades using its own facilities is the foundation of the NPO Saturn blades production.
During last decades NPO Saturn had mastered a production process of manufacturing compressor blades using dimensional electrical discharge machining.
As a result of this process development, the company has been able to design and fabricate the equipment allowing to form all the elements of a blade’s airfoil in a single part installation; NPO Saturn has also designed a process of treating a blade rough part before and after the EDM operation allowing to fabricate parts with the highest level of precision.
NPO Saturn is the only company in Russia utilizing such technology on an industrial scale, capable of designing and manufacturing special-purpose equipment.
Since the beginning of using this technology, the company has grown a number of knowledgeable process engineers, production tooling designers, programmers, setters of EDM installations and CNC machines who possess the required knowledge and hands-on experience with regard to production engineering and blades manufacturing.
The newly developed technology used in manufacturing compressor blades of all modern gas-turbine engines is focused on satisfying the demand of NPO Saturn and in the future the demand of other companies within the United engine corporation group.
Today, on October, 20th 2011 the laying of the first stone at the construction site of the new casting facility №140 has taken place.
Work on designing new engines is one of the prioritized ways of development for NPO Saturn.
During the Day of the company, the laying of the first stone at the construction site of the new casting facility took place. Construction of a new casting facility will enable NPO Saturn not only to increase the capacity of its casting production but to also master new casting technology using high-precision and high-efficiency equipment supplied by the likes of Cleveland Tooling and ALD.
The implementation of this equipment will enable the company to substantially automate its processes of casting production having equiaxial and single-crystal structure while increasing up to 80% manufacturing of good castings and bringing down their production cost.
NPO Saturn plans to make further significant efforts on restructuring its production facilities estimated by feasibility indicators. The company plans to create a modern high-efficiency production infrastructure having an end-to-end production cycle for some sub-assemblies and carry out relocation of some shops to newly constructed production sites having a more rational equipment arrangement based on the product and process logic. These action items are incorporated in the plan of the company’s organizational and technical development in the period of 2012-2016.
