Fast and Reliable Development of Composite Structures , Using Concurrent/Integrated Engineering

Abstract

Strong international competition in the civil aircraft market requires a continuous effort of the aircraft manufacturers to improving structural performance and reducing production costs of their products. A key step forward with great potential for achieving both goals is the application of composite materials to primary aircraft structures. However, designing and developing such structures is still a very demanding task, since the number of disciplines involved and the number of design alternatives are high, whereas experience is quite limited. The paper suggests a new Concurrent/Integrated Engineering (CIE) process that aims at applying advanced high-end simulation tools already very early in the design process. Whereas standard Concurrent Engineering approaches mainly focus on interdisciplinary co –located teams, the CIE process concentrates on interdisciplinary tool integration and improvement, where the team members can be dispersed. By that means not only development costs and time are reduced but – and this is specific for the new CIE process – the development risk is reduced and the quality of the product is improved. Involving all disciplines early in the design process might increase problems with redundancy, consistency and actuality of information as compared to sequential engineering. This is prevented by an information system for CIE (ISCIE) which recognises data independencies and finds out an optimal schedule for performing the different tasks. The ISCIE is dynamic which means adaptability to changes of the development process and furthermore allows for hardware-in-the-loop. This is important since not all disciplines can be simulated with sufficient accuracy and early hardware is sometimes beneficial for concreteness and acceptance of new products. Nevertheless, for speeding up the CIE process a new generation of analysis tools is required for as many disciplines as possible. The paper introduces some advanced structural mechanics codes for thermal, stress, failure and damage tolerance analysis. All of them are based on a shell representation of thin-walled composite structures and utilise the finite element method. Thus, the potential for efficient integration is high, which is underlined by illustrative examples.