As part of an effort to ensure it remains a competitive player in the growing global aerospace industry, Kaiser Aluminum Corp. is making ongoing investments to improve the efficiency and capacity of its Spokane Valley Trentwood Works plant that will total $160 million when completed later this year.

Trentwood plant manager Scott Endres says Kaiser began installing new equipment at the aluminum rolling mill here in 2005 as part of a broader $250 million companywide strategic investment at several of the Foothill Ranch, Calif.-based company's facilities across the U.S.

A substantial percentage of the highly-engineered aluminum plates manufactured at Trentwood, located at 15000 E. Euclid, are used in the manufacturing of aircraft with more than 50 seats. The global demand for new and larger commercial aircraft is projected to double during the next 10 years, says Dave Rickman, central engineering and maintenance services manager at Trentwood.

"That is a growth opportunity for Kaiser," Rickman says. "The market demand for aerospace drives demand for mill products."

Rickman says the industry trend of designing and manufacturing larger aircraft with a monolithic design—which means more parts are made out of one piece of aluminum plate versus welding numerous smaller components together—subsequently has increased the demand for Kaiser's aluminum plate and sheet products.

Endres says that the flat-rolled aluminum products made at Trentwood are shipped all over the world to distributors or directly to manufacturers, such as Boeing and others.

The capital improvements currently being made at Trentwood are intended to expand Kaiser's capacity to manufacture such products, and that big-dollar project currently is in its fourth and final phase, which should wrap up later this year, Endres and Rickman say.

Rickman doesn't rule out, however, more demand-driven expansion efforts at Trentwood in the near future.

Kaiser manufactures its aluminum plate and sheet products to its clients' specifications, and those finished products can widely vary in thicknesses. Trentwood's executives decline to disclose the exact thicknesses of the aluminum products it produces.

Rickman cites an example, though, of how a roughly five-inch thick aluminum plate manufactured by Kaiser is machined to make a piece of metal used in the wing tip of an F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet.

That finished piece has no welds because it was made from one slab of metal, and is not only light-weight but extremely durable, he says.

"There is a lot of scrap that comes from that process," Rickman says, since most of the solid metal to make the aircraft component is machined away to make the piece dimensional and lightweight. "But all that is brought back to the mill and melted back down," he adds.

The finished aluminum material used in such aircraft must be able to withstand a number of adverse conditions and is highly engineered by Kaiser to have a specific set of metallurgical and physical properties, such as high strength and corrosion resistance.

The manufacturing of the plate used in such an application begins with the flat-rolling of a cast aluminum ingot, which could weigh as much as 20,000 pounds. Some of the resulting, thicker flat-rolled plates made from those ingots could weigh up to 15,000 pounds, Endres says.

Rickman says that Kaiser's engineers specially formulate the molten aluminum alloys that go into the ingots to obtain certain metallurgical properties, depending on what the finished metal will be used for.

After being cast, the ingots get heated to more than 800 degrees and then are hot-rolled in Trentwood's aluminum mills, which put enormous amounts of pressure on the metal to roll it to the desired thickness.

There are three rolling mills at Trentwood, all of which are used to make the thinnest sheets, Endres says.

Once the flat-rolled aluminum stock comes off the rolling mills, it goes through a number of finishing treatments, including being heat-treated, to ensure that the formed metal has the specific properties required by a customer.

The ongoing upgrades at Trentwood mostly are focused in the heat-treating area of the 512-acre facility, which has more than 60 acres of manufacturing floor under roof.

Endres says the current phase of upgrades at Trentwood is costing about $21 million and involves expanding one of the heat-treating furnaces, which heat the metal to about 900 degrees and then cool it with water. This phase of work also includes streamlining areas of the manufacturing facility to improve the flow of product between each process, he says.

In the first phase of expansion, which began seven years ago, two horizontal heat-treating furnaces were installed that enabled Kaiser to heat-treat a larger number of aluminum plates at once, Endres says.

Heat-treating is performed to alter the physical and mechanical properties of the metal without changing the product's shape, Rickman says. The process can also improve other manufacturing qualities of the metal, such as increasing strength, and improving formability, he says.

Trentwood also received an ultrasonic scanning system, which scans each piece of finished product to ensure there aren't any defects in the metal.

In the second phase of upgrades, Endres says a third heat-treating furnace was installed, and also in the same section of the plant, a new plate stretcher was installed.

That machine, he says, has huge clamps that close down on each end of an aluminum plate after it comes out of the heat-treating furnace. The clamps use 19 million pounds of force to pull each end of the plate to actually stretch the metal between 1 percent and 3 percent of the total length of the plate.

The purpose of stretching is to reduce the residual stresses in the metal that are left from other manufacturing processes. It also allows the grain of the metal to align in the same direction, further increasing the metal's strength.

An automated rail car system to transport aluminum plates, sheets, and coils also was installed during the second phase, Rickman says.

A third phase of work doubled the length of one of the heat-treating furnaces, he says.

While the large majority of work is taking place in the area of Trentwood that's used to heat-treat its rolled aluminum products, other projects to improve efficiency and implement lean manufacturing techniques also have taken place across the plant as part of the overall upgrades and expansion, says Rickman.

Automated material-handling systems installed across the plant include the previously mentioned automated rail cars, as well as several new crane systems, he adds.

Trentwood currently employs around 850 people, and Rickman says the plant's future employment outlook is dependent upon demand for the aluminum products made at Trentwood, even though the company is positioning the plant for anticipated future order growth.

Dan Wilson, a Kaiser employee and union president of the Local 338 Spokane United Steelworkers chapter, which represents the hourly employees at Trentwood, says the facility faces a challenge in recruiting new, qualified workers.

"We struggle to find folks from the local area with the skills we need," Wilson says. "That is an ongoing challenge for us as a business."

He says Kaiser recruits trained employees through several of the area's community colleges and apprenticeship training programs, yet finding machine operators and maintenance workers still is often difficult.