Advanced Analysis Tools for Concurrent/Integrated Engineering of Composite Airframe Structures

Abstract

The terms ‘Right First Time’ and ‘First Right Time’ stand for the actual demands to the product development process, and the they characterize Concurrent/Integrated Engineering as development procedure: The right design has be to obtained already at the first time when a prototype is manufactured, and the duration of the whole process has to be minimized, in order to enable the user to serve the market as first supplier at right time. Typical aircraft design consists of three phases, which can be denoted as conceptual, pre-design and detailed design phase. Typically, in the conceptual phase some 30 different concepts are designed and corresponding manufacturing concepts are regarded. Usually, very rough analysis tools are applied which lead to an accuracy of the weight estimation of at most 92%. Based on such a data basis, the decision for one of the concepts can be risky, especially if there are equally ranked concepts. If the pre-design phase should reveal that the concept chosen is not as promising as expected, stepping back to the conceptual phase is necessary, but very costly. A Concurrent/Integrated Engineering (CIE) process is proposed which comprises both, conceptual and pre-design phase. This leads to a decision on a more solid data basis than presently. By use of advanced analysis tools, which are fast enough for conceptual design and at the same time accurate enough for pre-design purposes, time and cost can be reduced significantly as compared to state of the art analysis tools. Tools for thermal, stress, failure and damage tolerance analysis are introduced. Furthermore an information system for CIE (ISCIE) is discussed which will help to overcome problems with redundancy and actuality which frequently occur in today’s product development processes.