HALOSENSOR® – cutting production costs
HALOSENSOR® systems accurately locate blind holes in large, complex structures such as aircraft structures, and significantly improve drilling and alignment accuracy. Problems with mis-aligned or ‘pipped’ holes result in costly repair time, or at worst scrapped assemblies. In confined spaces, an operator finds it difficult to drill - for instance from inside a wing box - totally perpendicular to the workpiece, especially on tapered structures, causing the pilot hole to enter the wing at an angle. When the hole is opened up from other side, a pipped hole can be created – causing re-inspection and the need for an enlarged hole to be drilled to cover the damage.
In turn, this leads to a large cost penalty in terms of materials, inefficiency and delayed customer delivery. HALOSENSOR® systems provide the answer to this problem and are widely used in the aerospace sector to locate blind holes accurately in materials from 2mm to 100mm thickness.
What is HALOSENSOR®?
The HALOSENSOR® technology is a drill targeting system that eliminates the problems caused by back-drilling and produces a single, correctly aligned hole every time. The Through Skin Sensor or Hole Finder works on the principle of aligning the drill guide with a target placed on the inside of the structure. The HALOSENSOR® is able to accurately and quickly detect the position of the target and drill straight into the spar or strut, without the need for back-drilling.
With HALOSENSOR®, the task of drilling and riveting millions of holes in aircraft wings has become a ‘right first time’ operation.
Many of the world’s leading aircraft companies use HALOSENSOR® systems including Boeing, Bombardier and Embraer as well as a number of military organisations. In fact they have been used in the manufacture of every Airbus aircraft built since 2003.
The latest product in the HALOSENSOR® range is the NANO. This is a smaller, more manoeuvrable version of the original system and so is capable of coping with curved surfaces or other difficult to access areas.
The full range of HALOSENSOR® products can be seen in our datasheet.
Further information
Please contact our Aerospace Specialist for further information.
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