A Concept for a Multidisciplinary Design Process – an Application on High Lift Systems

Kurzfassung

Current developments of high lift systems for future civil aircraft show a tendency of integration of additional functionality compared to conventional systems. Planned enhanced functions for the Airbus A350XWB are e.g. adjustment of the centre of lift and lateral compensation of undesired roll movement. Possible additional functions in the future could be reached by using multifunctional control surfaces which provide classical functionalities of primary and secondary flight control. A challenge for these multifunctional control devices is the increasing solution space of possible high lift configurations with a higher degree of freedom. As a consequence, more iteration is needed to find a global optimum and a compromise between involved disciplines without negative impact on development time. To be able to define and asses new high lift systems for future aircraft concepts with enhanced functionality, a process as well as tools for the integration of involved disciplines are necessary. But since state of the art standards like ISO 15288 and VDI 2206 do not provide a detailed methodology on multidisciplinary architectural design, higher uncertainties regarding the final design of the high lift system arise. This leads to the need of more detailed and standardized processes which could mitigate risks by e.g. continuous model-based design and effective task transitions between different technical domains. This paper presents a concept for a multidisciplinary mechatronic engineering process and its tool-based implementation for the preliminary and detailed design phases. The work performed is based on the analysis of multidisciplinary interaction, of modelling and simulation techniques and of automation of CAD- and CAE- tool data exchange. To demonstrate and prove the applicability of this general process for a specific system, the process is applied to the design of aircraft high lift systems, representative for a safety-critical, multidisciplinary system. Considering this use case, the presented work mitigates design uncertainties. This is achieved especially in the context of interaction between the engineering disciplines kinematics, control & monitoring, actuation, installation and structure & stress.