Jobs with a future - Young-DGM Augsburg visits MT Aerospace AG

Your studies or doctorate are as good as in the bag. What is the next step in your career? In a young talent event organized by the yDGM Augsburg, the participants learned about career prospects in the aerospace industry in the field of lightweight structures and composite materials.

On 26 January 2023, 13 interested students and doctoral candidates from yDGM-Augsburg took part in a factory tour of MT Aerospace AG in Augsburg. The medium-sized company is a leading international supplier of components and systems for the aerospace industry in programs such as the Ariane-5-rocket, the Galileo satellite, and the Ariane-6-rocket program. MT Aerospace's engineers are faced with questions such as, "What scale do you have to think and produce in when the end product is 5.4-metre diameter propellant tanks for ARIANE 6?" 

These ESA rockets can carry up to 4.5 tons of cargo into orbit. Since a launch costs over a hundred million dollars, there is no tolerance for material failure. Therefore, material development and quality assurance play a major role. Here, the participants were able to see destructive testing using tensile and ground samples, as well as X-ray testing as part of the Non-Destructive Inspection (NDI) of a 4 x 3-metre dome segment. The highlight was the test bunker for targeted bursting - a depth of 15 meters allows no fear of heights.

But how do you manufacture components of this size? Conventional bending doesn't work when a huge sheet must become a trough. This is done with the help of shot peening, while camera systems compare the actual state with the CAD model in real-time. To ensure that the high demands on mechanical and chemical stability are met, these components made of high-tech aluminium alloy or titanium are joined by friction stir welding on an automated welding line. In the end, these thin-walled tanks are automatically wound with deep-frozen prepreg fibres.

Besides the main business, we were able to discover a new division: The additive manufacturing hall, where a team is researching how jigs and smaller components can be manufactured completely without material loss by, among other things, milling and machining. The special feature: No plastic is used here, but the same aerospace alloys.

With the excursion to MT Aerospace, we as young scientists wanted to find out what fields of work are open in the industry. There were many in-depth questions about processes and technology, which the respective employees were happy to answer. Some of them were even recent graduates of the University of Augsburg themselves.

Report by Samuel Griza for the yDGM-Augsburg. Samuel is a research assistant in the WG 'Chemistry of Materials and Resources' at the Institute for Materials Resource Management in Augsburg. Until the end of January 2023, he was a Master student 'Materials Science' at the University of Augsburg.

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