In the beginning there was an altimeter - Meggitt PLC

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00 34 REVIEW | AUGUST WINTER 2010 BLADE RUNNERS
The main tail and rotor blades of over 2,000 H60 Black Hawk and Sea Hawk helicopters are heated by MPC Rockmart’s electro-thermal ice protection technology. And then there are the “Pigs” and “Salad Bowls”, operators’ nicknames for fairings and nose cones. These products are just two of ten components in the facility’s “higher assemblies”—higher value integrated component packages that stop the spinners as well as the rotor blades from icing up on Bell-Boeing’s V22 Osprey vertical take-off plane. Heated products like this represent one of two streams in MPC Rockmart’s rapidly growing composites business. The other— mostly laminates for helicopter interiors—are unheated. Hot or cold, both may seem worlds away from the flexible fuel tank business that dominates the plant. They flow, nonetheless, from the materials science capability that underpins the output of the facility as a whole and the new Meggitt Polymers & Composites division within which MPC Rockmart now operates. In simple terms, MPC Rockmart’s electro-thermal ice protection products have something in common with the de-icing wiring arrays found in the rear windshields of ordinary domestic cars. Meggitt’s arrays for helicopters are made from etched foil or a web of copper or alloy elements intricately woven by hand or machine, adhered to a textile base. Made from nylon, fibre glass or graphite carbon, that base will have been pre-impregnated with lightweight composite materials that maximise electro-thermal transfer, minimise weight and withstand a range of punishing environmental conditions. our joint operations complement each other perfectly. Now we can go from one end of a programme to another In addition to the US military’s front line military helicopters—the Black Hawk and Sea Hawk and the MH60 variant used for special operations—MPC Rockmart’s electro-thermal blade heaters are used by numerous Sikorsky platforms. The S92, Sikorsky’s fourbladed twin-engine medium-lift helicopter, carries Meggitt’s complex composite electro-thermally heated engine air inlets. Originally won by Meggitt Polymers & Composites’ former Coventry facility before it was bought by Meggitt, the programme has been the subject of a strategic transfer to Rockmart, closer to the US-based customer. The work, similar to Rockmart’s Sikorsky heavy-lift CH53E programme, has been supported successfully by MPC trainers from the UK. The S76, a multi-purpose medium-sized helicopter, carries Meggitt fire walls and bell mouths—metallic components with electrically-heated elements bonded to connectors located at the engine air intake. Randy Holbrooks, who heads up the facility’s ice protection engineering team, has been intimately involved with the growth of this counterpoint to the facility’s fuel tanks business for a decade. He Above: Randy Holbrooks, Director of Engineering, Ice Protection & Composites, says smarter use of electro-thermal power will enable smaller, lighter and more efficient engines. highlights the facility’s presence on successful new programmes with many years to run like the V22 Osprey and strong demand from the workhorses of current conflicts, Black Hawk in particular. He confirms: “The US military has ordered a mix of around 1200 Black Hawk and Sea Hawk, so we’re not only providing spares and repairs for a very demanding current fleet, but equipment for production aircraft, which are at record rates right now.” Icebreaker Holbrooks is also keen to highlight MPC Rockmart’s growing ability to deliver profitable original engineering beyond the “build-to-print” programmes that have traditionally characterised Rockmart’s output. With his team, Holbrooks has developed unique composite engine inlets with a patent-pending embedded flex section for the heavily-funded, very solid CH-53K Super Stallion programme. The inlets for the Marine Corps’ batch of 156 of the US military’s largest, heavy lift transport helicopter will work with the Donaldson’s engine air particle protection system, providing foreign object debris filtration to protect the helicopter’s turbine engines from sand, dust and ice ingestion. This original engineering development work is rooted in the plant’s experience of complex composite structures (a capability shared with its sister facility in Loughborough) and won on the strength of MPC Rockmart’s performance on the CH-53E, for which the facility provides composites for complex heated inlet shapes. > REVIEW | WINTER 2010 00 35
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In the beginning there was an altimeter - Meggitt PLC

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