Project background
Halcyon Aerospace Structures LLC fabricates engine mount brackets, rib assemblies and tooling plates for rotorcraft and space launch programmes from its Wichita, Kansas plant. The company holds AS9100 certification and works to customer source-approval requirements on every flight-critical part.
Titanium was the problem. Ti-6Al-4V at 3–6 mm was cut on a waterjet and finished with a hand deburr and file operation, because the previous laser cell could not hold a narrow recast layer on reactive alloys and the customer rejected the wider heat-affected zone. The waterjet route cost 22 minutes of secondary work per bracket.
Aluminium-lithium 2195 arrived from the customer as a machined near-net shape and needed only trimming, but that trimming was done on a manual mill with a fixture, and each change cost 40 minutes of setup.
Inconel 718 brackets were cut on a reliable 4 kW fibre machine, but on 5 mm material the pierce left a recast layer that failed customer specification on roughly one part in five, and the part had to be reworked or scrapped.
The challenge
Every new cutting source for flight-critical titanium needs a source-approval file: an approved process, a documented parameter set, verified consumable lots and a training record. Halcyon's previous laser was not approvable for titanium and never would have been.
The waterjet's 22-minute hand-finishing operation sat on the critical path for every bracket, and it was staffed by people Halcyon could not easily recruit — the finishing bench was the constraint on the whole assembly floor, not the laser.
The manual mill trimming on aluminium-lithium was the second bottleneck, at 40 minutes per change and 11 changes a week.
And the 4 kW machine's scrap rate on 5 mm Inconel — roughly 20% — was a standing cost the quality organisation reviewed quarterly.
Our solution
Halcyon installed an LP-F6025-30kW Heavy-Duty fibre laser in a dedicated, separated cell with its own nitrogen supply and dust handling, adjacent to the existing quality laboratory rather than in the open fabrication bay. The enclosure was part of the customer's source-approval conversation from the first site visit.
Cutting is done with nitrogen and the closed cutting head, and the parameter set for Ti-6Al-4V and Al-Li 2195 was locked into the control with operator-level access removed. Every job runs the same approved programme, and the control exports gas flow, pierce strategy and consumable life for the quality file.
An LP-F4020-4kW was retained for the light structural and tooling work that had been on the older machine, and an LP-F8025-40kW was added in a second phase to take the 8–20 mm Inconel and high-strength steel work the 4 kW source had been rejecting.
Halcyon's engineering team wrote the qualification file directly from the production data the machine generated rather than from a separate trial batch, which cut the source-approval timeline from an estimated nine months to just under five.
Delivered outcome
Secondary hand finishing on titanium brackets fell from 22 minutes per part to under 4, and the finishing bench that had been the constraint on the assembly floor was released to two other operations. Total rework attributable to cut quality fell 72% across titanium, aluminium-lithium and Inconel parts.
The 5 mm Inconel reject rate fell from 19.7% to 1.4% once the work moved to the 40 kW source with the narrow pierce strategy, removing one of the largest standing costs in the quality report.
The aluminium-lithium trimming operation moved off the manual mill entirely and onto the 30 kW machine, saving 40 minutes of setup on each of roughly 11 changes a week and releasing the two milling fixtures dedicated to that job.
The source-approval file was accepted at the customer's first review with no findings on the cutting process, and audit preparation time on the cutting cell fell from about two days per quarter to half a day.
First-article inspection on titanium brackets now passes without a concession request, and first-pass yield on the programme moved from 91.5% to 98.8% over three quarters.