For its first appearance at the Singapore Airshow, the company — a specialist in steel and titanium extruded profiles — is looking to finalise discussions with Rolls-Royce and United Technologies, both of which operate facilities in Singapore.
Cefival CEO Pierre Münch faces a busy schedule at Singapore Airshow 2018. For its first appearance at the event, the company — a fully owned subsidiary of Siderval, part of Italy's Calvi Holding — aims to enlarge its aerospace customer base. Based in Persan, 40km north of Paris, the company is specialised in steel and titanium extruded profiles for aerostructures, aeroengines and aircraft cabin interiors.
The company uses the hot extrusion process; steel and titanium billets are heated and passed through a die at a temperature of 1,200°C to produce the desired shape. The process can be used to obtain very precise profiles. Cefival supplies passenger seat tracks for the A350 and Boeing 787 as well as engine rings.
Depending on customer requirements, parts are delivered either unfinished or machined in the form of rolled, welded rings. Cefival is equipped with bending and flash welding facilities with multiple presses to improve the forming of each part, along with tempering furnaces. Cefival already supplies parts for the following engines: CFM56 (Boeing 737 and Airbus A320ceo families), GE90 (Boeing 777) and GP7000 (Airbus A380).
Aerostructures
In the aerostructures sector, Cefival produces profiles for various critical aircraft components, such as engine pylons, tail spars, floor reinforcements, doors, etc. The company can produce extruded parts up to 14m in length with a minimum thickness of 3.5mm.
The company hopes that its know-how will attract interest from Spirit AeroSystems, whose Subang site in Malaysia is currently being expanded. A new 4,600m2 building is currently being finished. It is scheduled to open in mid-2018, at which time the workforce is due to expand by 300 people.
Münch has also identified other targets. During the show the company has scheduled meetings with Rolls-Royce and United Technologies, both of whom have facilities in Singapore. The British engine-maker assembles and tests Trent engines, while the U.S. group's Pratt & Whitney subsidiary produces fan blades and critical turbine rotating components for the PurePower family of geared turbofan engines.
UTC, Rolls-Royce
“The meetings will give us the opportunity to present our know-how,” says Münch. “United Technologies is not a customer of ours, so we will give them an overview of all our products. The Singapore Airshow will also give us a chance to present proposals to Rolls-Royce for structural profiles. Rolls-Royce is now the parent company of Spain's ITP, who is already a customer. That gives us a good opening.”
The drive to diversify the aerospace customer base, particularly in the engine sector, is accompanied by a two-year, €3-4m investment programme to modernise Cefival's production equipment. The extrusion press has been upgraded to reduce the “buy-to-fly ratio” from 6 to 3, which can represent potential raw material savings of almost 50% in some cases.
In addition, this year Cefival plans to fully automate the operations carried out to repair and reload tooling, which is subjected to extreme mechanical and thermal loads, prior to each extrusion operation. The company has also introduced automatic dimensional inspection of its different products.
To read our full Singapore Airshow 2018 preview issue, click here.