His Brainchild: Instant Mini-Factories
A cerebral 35-year-old college dropout is fanning the flames of an ongoing revolution on the plant floor: coupling digital information with manufacturing processes. Gene Kirila II has dreamed up a novel portable cell in which a computer runs the complex chemistry of making products from composites. Because the cell can be controlled from afar, it's also an example of Internet-assisted manufacturing.
Kirila's cell, expandable from its basic dimensions of 24 by 24 by 18 feet, can be used for the automated production of composites in low to medium volume, up to about 100,000 parts a year. Tooling, or making a mold for the cell, requires an investment of only $25,000, vs. some $1 million to $2 million for an existing technology that is its closest rival in quality of the finished product.
The cell uses a thermosetting technique, one of the two that dominate the making of composites. In thermosetting, liquid chemicals are mixed and allowed to solidify with the aid of liquid catalysts. The other technique is thermoforming, in which plastic pellets are melted and linked together with fiberglass and other reinforcing materials under high heat and pressure. Both those technologies, when used in the conventional manner, involve a lot of labor as well as capital. Unlike Kirila's cell, they are also dangerously polluting and require expensive equipment to control their exhausts.
Kirila, in short, has created the manufacturing counterpart of a McDonald's hamburger outlet. It serves up boats, truck parts, and even railroad cars with quality and precision, at low costs never before attained. A Kirila cell can be dropped into China or Minnesota, or any place that has electricity and compressed air. In three days the customer has a humming little factory.
The cell's one or two workers don't have to be technicians; a computer program monitors and controls the process, and they are guided step by step by graphic displays on computer screens. The system doesn't let the workers proceed unless they have properly executed the previous production step. If a worker encounters a problem he or she can't solve, a Solutions Center, manned around the clock by experts, is available on the Internet for help. Kirila's idea succeeds where somewhat similar Japanese "lights out" manufacturing failed because it relied on robots rather than people. It also had no communications link to knowledgeable engineers able to remedy problems as they occurred.
Kirila grew up in an industrial setting in the Shenonda Valley, which spreads across the Pennsylvania-Ohio border 60 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. His father is co-owner of a heavy-duty construction company; early on, Kirila was exposed to steel mills and other industrial enterprises. But in high school and college, football was Kirila's true passion: Not only did he play offensive lineman, but he also, in working in an industrial-arts class during his high school years, built exercise machines for the football team. While at Youngstown State University, he started a company to build exercise machines, Pyramid Fitness of Sharpsburg, Pa., and dropped out to run it. Ten years later its annual sales reached $44 million.
Frustration drove Kirila to design his cell. Composites, which can be made flexible in one part of a product and rigid in another part, are an attractive material for building exercise machines. But a lack of reliable production methods discouraged Pyramid from using the materials.
It took four years to develop the software that runs the cell, which is called virtual engineered composites, or VEC. It is an outgrowth of Kirila's longtime belief that an operating system, similar to the one that runs computers, can be designed for a manufacturing process.
By experts' accounts, VEC changes the game in low-volume composite manufacturing. Not only does it sharply reduce the cost of making thermoset composite products, but it also makes sturdier and better-looking boat hulls and other products than traditional technologies can. It's speedier too. VEC can make a 17-foot boat hull, for example, in 70 minutes. The older way can take days.
With computer controls throughout the process--supervising as many as 280 different manufacturing operations--Kirila's cell slashes production time. "The formula for success," as Kirila calls it, is relentless adjustment of the capricious and changing chemistry of the liquid components as they solidify. VEC links resin storage, injection pump, mold, and process controls into an integrated system. Temperature, viscosity, and other variables are under constant supervision and control; the data are displayed graphically for operators to see in real time. Automatic on-the-spot verification that each previous step was properly executed accounts for the system's reliability.
Inside the cell is another clever invention, a "floating" mold. In the types of composites manufacturing that VEC competes against, a new set of molds, costing as much as $2 million, has to be made for each product. The halves of the mold, which close like the halves of a walnut shell, are chiseled out of steel or aluminum in a painstaking process that can take up to a year. Molds of that type still make sense for large production volumes. But for smaller runs, the floating mold is a better way to go.
Kirila and Robert McCollum, director of engineering at Pyramid, devised a system in which two tough composite laminated skins, each cut to accommodate the shape of a new product, are attached to a universal metallic mold frame. "Universal" means that the frame is reusable and stays unchanged. The space between each skin and its metallic support is filled with water, and the air is pumped out. Since water is noncompressible in the pressure ranges used in VEC, the skins become a rigid hydraulic system--like two firm waterbeds facing each other across a cavity. The mold halves are closed, and composite material is injected into the cavity.
The floating mold allows better control of the mold surface, resulting in faster production and a better-looking surface on the product. The mold skins cost only $1,000, compared with a minimum of $42,000 for conventional molds. There's another advantage. It takes only ten minutes to change the skins, thus creating a new mold. This introduces a new degree of flexibility to the manufacture of composite parts and products. "Out of that same work cell, I could be making bathtubs in the morning, boats in the afternoon, and utility-truck and trailer parts the next day," says Kirila. "The cell would be perfect for Third World countries where they don't have the volume to make expensive new molds."
What really forced Kirila and McCollum to come up with the floating mold was a multimillion-dollar contract that Pyramid could not have carried out with conventional molds; it didn't have the money to buy them. Kirila and McCollum hit upon the bright idea of substituting laughably cheap water for costly steel and aluminum after long discussions of such alternatives as sand, glass beads, and even Ping-Pong balls. If ever there was a triumph of ingenuity over convention, the floating mold is it. It opens the way to making composites competitive not only with aluminum and other metals but also with plain wood.
In 1995, Kirila built a spacious factory on a 15-acre plot in an industrial park in Greenville, Pa., rimmed by cornfields--a site that testifies that Silicon Valley has no monopoly on ingenuity. Kirila and his 65 employees used their new method to make composite parts for Ingersoll-Rand and Acuma Machine Tools, a Japanese company, and boats for sports enthusiasts. With accurate dimensions achieved on the first try, boats built with VEC have been shown in industry-sponsored tests to ride faster and better.
Kirila's original intention was to spread the VEC gospel and franchise his cells around the world. He and some friends invested $12 million in the project. But when venture capitalists failed to come through with an additional $50 million that Kirila felt he needed, he sold the technology and the company last year to Genmar Holdings in Minneapolis, the second-largest automated builder of boats in the U.S. Pyramid now operates as Genmar's R&D subsidiary.
A cell is already making boats at Genmar, and a $12 million VEC plant containing four cells will be completed this summer. The troubleshooting Solutions Center, located at Pyramid in Pennsylvania, now connects via the Internet with the cell in Minnesota. Genmar has big plans to use VEC to build other things besides boats: transportation equipment, recreational vehicles, doors, window frames, and walls and roofs for small buildings. The company will both license VEC and work with others in joint ventures.
Says Steven J. Kubisen, senior vice president at Genmar, who joined the company last year because he was excited about VEC: "We estimate that VEC is applicable to more than $10 billion of the total $25 billion annual market in composite parts." Not a bad prospect for former offensive lineman Kirila, whose college professors thought that all he could do was play football.