Integration of multi-physics analysis into the cabin design process using virtual reality

Abstract

The design of an aircraft cabin and especially its disciplinary evaluation is a highly specialized process in the product development of an aircraft. Low-fidelity assessment of a cabin design is not commonly possible as there are many interactions with other disciplines and very detailed inputs are usually necessary in a particular form and format. In order to enable such high-fidelity evaluation processes for complex cabin systems in the early design stages of the cabin, the use of the Common Parametric Aircraft Configuration Schema (CPACS) is proposed in this paper for ensuring digital consistency among different disciplinary tools. Initially developed for the overall aircraft design, CPACS has been extended with a wide variety of definitions for the structural and cabin design. These support the efficient data exchange between the involved disciplines in a model-based design approach. This process is exemplified here by deriving different multi-fidelity and multi-physics simulation models from a central CPACS dataset. For multi-fidelity analysis, finite element models as well as statistical energy analysis models for the vibro-acoustic evaluation are demonstrated. In order to illustrate multi-physics capabilities, static structural and thermal variants for the finite element models are derived as well. A main advantage of using consistent data modelling is the fact, that all results from the different analyses can be fed back to a central visualisation platform. This enables the intuitive and collaborative exploration of the design as well as the results from the heterogeneous disciplines with all involved partners. The visualisation model is also derived from the central CPACS dataset and realised in this study in a virtual reality environment using the Unity game engine.