Excessive Modularity Hindered Development of the 787 200
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Unknown Lamer
from the why-pay-engineers dept.
from the why-pay-engineers dept.
TAGmclaren writes "The Harvard Business Review is running a fascinating article exploring the issues facing Boeing's Dreamliner. Rather than simply blaming outsourcing, as much of the commentary has been focused on, the article delves into the benefits of integration and how being integrated when developing a new product gives engineers more degrees of freedom. From the article: 'Historically, Boeing understood that, and had worked with its subcontractors on that basis. If it was going to rely on them, it would provide them with detailed blueprints of the parts that were required — after Boeing had already created them. That, in turn, meant that Boeing had to design all the relevant pieces of the puzzle itself, first. But with the 787, it appears that Boeing tried a very different approach: rather than having the puzzle solved and asking the suppliers to provide a defined puzzle piece, they asked suppliers to create their own blueprints for parts. The puzzle hadn't been properly solved when Boeing asked suppliers for the pieces. It should come as little surprise then, that as the components came back from far-flung suppliers, for the first plane ever made of composite materials... those parts didn't all fit together. Time and cost blew out accordingly. It's easy to blame the outsourcing. But, in this instance, it wasn't so much the outsourcing, as it was the decision to modularize a complicated problem too soon.'"
Re:Lithium batteries considered dangerous (Score:4, Interesting)
In it, he termed the architecture of the GS Yuasa battery packs supplied to Boeing "inherent unsafe," and predicted more fires from the same causes due to its design.
Specifically, Musk criticized the use of large-format lithium-ion cells "without enough space between them to isolate against the cell-to-cell thermal domino effect."
He also noted that when thermal runaway occurs in the larger cells, more energy is released by the single cell than comes from a small-format "commodity" cell, of the type used by the thousands in Tesla battery packs.
And he went on to highlight what he viewed as the dangers of batteries using those large-format cells, saying they have a "fundamental safety issue" because it's harder to keep the internal temperature of a large-format cell consistent from the center to the edges.
Not surprisingly, Mike Sinnett--Boeing's chief engineer for the 787 project--counters that the company designed the pack to cope with not only a single cell failure but to contain runaway thermal events as well."
http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1082007_tesla-ceo-musk-boeing-787-batteries-inherently-unsafe [greencarreports.com]
Boeing (Score:5, Interesting)
There was a short article on the Dreamliner in the latest New Yorker magazine REQUIEM FOR A DREAMLINER? . Quote Surowiecki :The Dreamliner was supposed to become famous for its revolutionary design. Instead, it’s become an object lesson in how not to build an airplane.
To understand why, you need to go back to 1997, when Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas. Technically, Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas. But, as Richard Aboulafia, a noted industry analyst with the Teal Group, told me, “McDonnell Douglas in effect acquired Boeing with Boeing’s money.” McDonnell Douglas executives became key players in the new company, and the McDonnell Douglas culture, averse to risk and obsessed with cost-cutting, weakened Boeing’s historical commitment to making big investments in new products. Aboulafia says, “After the merger, there was a real battle over the future of the company, between the engineers and the finance and sales guys.” The nerds may have been running the show in Silicon Valley, but at Boeing they were increasingly marginalized by the bean counters.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2013/02/04/130204ta_talk_surowiecki#ixzz2JTGx7SPc
Re:No specs? (Score:4, Interesting)
Isn't that how all modern airliners are created? I'm trying to remember a documentary about the development of the A380, IIRC the entire thing was designed in CAD, the factories were then tooled and the first plane was created from parts from the same production line as the production run would come from.
The Airbus also suffered from manufacturing problems as the German and Spanish facilities were using a different version of the CATIA CAD tool than the English and French facilities. This resulted in hilarity when modules from different locations did not mate as intended.
Re:This is what happens... (Score:3, Interesting)