SL Laser Systems AG & FACC AG - Working relationship projects bright future

Applications in the composites industries for 2D and 3D laser projectors are fast gaining ground - especially now in the aerospace industries. ?Fischer Advanced Composite Components (FACC) was founded by the Fischer Sporting Goods Group in 1989. Within a few years, FACC quickly became one of the leading, pioneering forces in the area of research, development, production and maintenance of composite aviation components for such company's as AIRBUS and Boeing. Prior to a working partnership with SL Laser AG, the majority of the manufacturing was done with the aid of manual templates. The templates were manually positioned into the moulds and repeatedly inserted for different layers. This production method is very time-consuming and inaccurate due to the constant removal and placement of the template. Also, the template was being aligned manually, often to pen lines, which also carried its own level of inaccuracy, therefore adding to the overall tolerance issue. This method also added a great deal of unnecessary cost to the production process, hindering FACC's efficient production methodology and overall profitability. In 2002, FACC AG looked for alternatives to this manual process and found a possible solution by utilizing laser projection systems.

At first, FACC experimented with another brand of laser projection system, before switching and standardizing with systems from SL Laser AG. To ensure the addition of laser projection systems provided FACC with the degree of accuracy and reliability they were looking for, four workstations were initially installed with SL Laser 3D projectors and following a period of rigorous testing and production trials, FACC were convinced by the innovative technology and easy-to-use software of SL Laser and installed the SL Laser projectors in the workstations that are responsible for manufacturing the Flap-Track covers for the new A380 from AIRBUS.

To enhance the manufacturing process, the projectors were mounted to a sliding roof-mounted device which was provided by FACC and thanks to the level of cooperation between the two companies, FACC the chose to equip additional workstations exclusively with projectors from SL Laser. At the time of this documents creation, there are a total of twenty-seven SL projectors installed at FACC which are responsible for production of various components for Boeing, Airbus, Bombardier, Rolls-Royce, Pratt&Whitney and Aviation Partners Boeing. By installing SL Laser projectors, FACC also noticed a profound increase in time efficiency, compared to the old manual template method of production and also realized a staggering increase in overall production accuracy, which is maintained indefinitely. An example of this is as follows;

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One of the workstations needed a special custom-created solution, only available from SL Laser. The production problem is commonly referred to as "springback", which refers to the result from two moulds that shrink together after hardening and after the parts have been removed from the mould. This is caused by the fact that the moulds are machined exactly to the required dimension of the finished part and do not allow or compensate for the changes in the material properties when fully cured. One possibility to address this problem was to widen the mould to compensate for the springback amount; however the problem with this solution was that the required measurements for the actual model and the projection model would then not correspond to each other. Another way of compensating for the springback would have been to use a correction of the model with CAD software, based upon the original finished model, however the additional costs of added man power and software proved this solution to be unreasonable. After much deliberation, FACC turned to SL Laser with the springback problem and following several meetings with the SL software programmers, SL was able to present a permanent viable solution within two weeks. SL Laser's programmers were able to create an innovative software addition that allowed alteration of the original measurements so that an exact projection was possible, even with complex parts. This solution not only provided FACC with a permanent solution to this problem, but also allowed them to cut manufacturing costs and provide a reliable method of calculating the all important aspect of production time management. The cooperation between FACC and SL Laser to work toward a common goal, proved to be beneficial for both companies. For further information, please contact

Tags: sl-laser, assembly, 3d laser, prodirector