Airbus
OEM : Aerospace
Airbus is a leader in designing, manufacturing and delivering aerospace products, services and solutions to customers on a worldwide scale. With over 130,000 employees and as the largest aeronautics and space company in Europe and a worldwide leader, Airbus is at the forefront of the aviation industry. We build the most innovative commercial aircraft and consistently capture about half of all commercial airliner orders. Thanks to our deep understanding of changing market needs, customer focus and technological innovation, we offer products that connect people and places via air and space.
Recent Posts
Mapped: An Interactive Journey of the Airbus A320 Supply Chain
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Explore an interactive map of the Airbus A320 supply chain facilities and transport methods. Siemens enters the metaverse. New techniques for recycling plastics.
Assembly Line
Airbus Ventures Leads Solestial’s Oversubscribed $10M Seed Round
Airbus Ventures announces its newest lead investment in Solestial, Inc. (“Solestial”), the solar energy company for space. The round was joined by AEI HorizonX, GPVC, Stellar Ventures, Industrious Ventures, and others. This new funding will be used to ramp up production and customer engagement capabilities, as the company expands ground and flight testing in parallel; additional investments in R&D and go-to-market functions are also planned.
Solestial’s solar panels can be produced at scale using automated production methods at 90 percent lower cost than solar panels widely used by the satellite industry. This best-in-class silicon photovoltaic technology, optimized for space, also delivers orbital reliability of at least 10 years in low Earth orbit (LEO). Economical solar panels with scalable manufacturing capability are critical to meeting the demand of the satellite industry, which is projected to grow from 5,000 operational satellites to 100,000 or more by 2030, a 40% CAGR.
Flight of the navigator – the Airbus quest to build, run its own multi-market 5G network
Airbus’ decision to go it alone, separately from traditional telco operators, is down to security, which remains the north star for digital change in just about every Industry 4.0 scenario. “The data has to be stored on our campus without external connectivity. That is one of the main reasons for selecting private networks.” The only data flowing out of is network data, for network control; all the industrial data remains locked into the edge networks.
But back to the use cases, which are the things on Castagnino’s mind, actually. Private cellular is being used already in Toulouse and Hamburg for site surveillance, flight-to-ground data offloads (“95 percent of the volume”), quality inspections, automated guided vehicles (AGVs), collaborative robotics, digital twins “the shop floor with digital mockup”, private mobile radio (PMR), and asset tracking (“Supply Chain 4.0”, including via international roaming).
CesiumAstro Secures $60 Million In Oversubscribed Series B Funding
CesiumAstro Inc. (“Cesium” or “Company”), a developer of advanced aerospace communication systems, today announced it has secured $60 million in an oversubscribed Series B funding round, co-led by Airbus Ventures and Forever Ventures, with strategic participation from L3Harris Technologies (NYSE: LHX). Returning investors include Kleiner Perkins, Lavrock Ventures, Franklin Templeton Blackhorse Fund, and HEICO (NYSE: HEI).
Aerospace, Defense and Industry 4.0
“Designing for manufacturability, modeling the production environment, and then producing our products with a minimum of duplicated effort—this can give us the breakthroughs in speed and affordability that the A&D environment needs in a time of limited budgets and rapidly changing threats,” explains Daughters. “These technologies are an essential component to our ‘digital thread’ across the product life cycle. They give us the ability to simulate tradeoffs between capability, manufacturability, complexity, materials and cost before transitioning to the physical world.”
“In a nutshell, I4.0 involves leveraging technology to better serve the world,” says Matt Medley, industry director for A&D manufacturing at IFS, a multinational enterprise software company. “More than just collecting and processing mounds of data via sensors and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), I4.0 is turning data into actionable intelligence to not only drive efficiency and grow profits, but to also help companies be good stewards of our natural resources and local communities. Aerospace and defense companies whose enterprise software can keep pace with developments like additive manufacturing, AI, digital twins, and virtual and augmented reality (V/AR) are the ones that will thrive in an increasingly digital 4.0 era.”
How Paint Robots Reduce Rework
There are few wild beasts more fearsome and concerning to the everyday finishing engineer than the dread three R’s: Rework, Rejections and RMAs.
In finishing, particularly when it comes to spray processes, achieving the kind of consistency and quality customers expect requires a high degree of both reliability and precision. Experienced painters and operators – or elaborate automation systems – can be engineered to provide high output, but over time many parts will seep through the cracks and simply not get the attention they require.
Automating Carbon-Fiber Composite Fuselage Assembly
“During the last 10 years, increased commercial aircraft production rates have led to more interest in automating assembly processes,” Brieskorn points out. “To reduce process times and cost, automation is becoming more appealing to engineers.
“However, the main challenge is that large aircraft parts come with relatively high geometry deviations, so robots need sensor guidance,” says Brieskorn. “Strict requirements and tight tolerances in the final structures are also challenging for standard automation systems.”
The Journey of Additive Manufacturing and Artificial Intelligence
Airbus leads major €8m investment in energy harvesting chip designer
This funding round was led by existing investors Airbus Ventures and French venture capital fund Partech, with KBC Focus Fund, W.IN.G, Noshaq Ventures, LeanSquare, Nivelinvest and Vives also contributing and brings the total investment to $13.2m.
The company sees tens of billions of connected IoT and edge computing devices starting to be deployed and activity will keep on ramping up in the decades ahead. Reliance on disposable batteries in this context is simply impractical, with heavy network maintenance costs being incurred (as depleted batteries will need replacing periodically), along with huge damage to the environment.