A Single Digital Thread Approach to Aircraft Detailed Design

June 2017 - December 2017

Summary :

This project was completed with ASDL during my time as an undergraduate researcher. Sponsored by Airbus, this project was initiated at an open-ended investigation into ways to reduce the design cycle time for commercial aircraft. My participation on the project spanned over two years which encompassed two phases of the project.

The first phase was focused on identifying an area within the Airbus design cycle for commercial aircraft where we believed there was a significant potential for time savings. Through extensive collaboration with Airbus engineers in the US and Europe, the detailed design phase of aircraft design was identified as a promising candidate. In this phase, there was a signigicant amount of time spent in the loop of manually extracting dimensions from a "dummy" CAD model (containing no feature tree), inputting these features into an Airbus proprietary analysis tool, and making changes to the CAD model based off the results of the analysis. As such, the first phase of the project was focused on developping software solutions to provide automative feature extraction from the CAD model in a format compatible with the Airbus analysis tool, with the use case focused on the aircraft wing rib. This phase of the project culminated with a publication to the AIAA SciTech Forum.

The second phase of the project was focused on intervening in the now increasingly automated loop of feature extraction, analysis, and redesign to implement an optimization routine to suggest possibilities to reduce the weight of the aircraft wing rib based on the results of the analysis tool. This was implemented as part of discussions with Airbus where it became apparent that there was a significant amount of implicit knowledge and experience necessary to use the results of the analysis tool to make changes to the part's CAD model. Implementing this optimization routine reduced the reliance on experience and implicit knowledge by making suggestions about possibilities to reduce the part's mass. This optimization was implemented and demonstrated a significant weight savings across the aircraft wing.

My Contribution :

Paper Abstract :

A multi-phase design methodology to incorporate innovative solutions and subsequently, reduce delay costs into the detailed design process of a commercial aircraft is presented. The Single Digital Thread Approach to Detailed Design (STAnDD) provides the capability of efficiently using and transferring the knowledge from the small scale of components level to the larger scale of subsystems and systems in a collaborative framework. The detailed design process requires the management of a great amount of data, it can also be defined as a multi-disciplinary and highly constrained problem. For the integration of product, processes and resources, Collaborative Engineering (CE) is leveraged through use of Product Lifecycle Management tools, to help with the design, analysis and virtual manufacturing. The implementation of STAnDD is laid over a multi-phase plan in which a bottom-up approach is considered, bringing savings and knowledge from the component level up to the subsystem level and the system level. This paper will focus on the first phase with the wing rib chosen as a proof of concept and the foundation for all other components. The planning of STAnDD and the development of its capabilities require an in-depth knowledge of the company’s processes, along with a comprehensive understanding of the tools used. After such understanding has been achieved, three distinct phases can be identified in the detailed design process of a wing rib: Data Extraction, Optimization and CAD model update. Data extraction and the update take the most time in the process, and therefore any improvement in any of these two tasks will result in significant time savings during the process. To reduce the time in the first operation, an automatic feature extraction capability was implemented. The implementation of the automatic feature extraction in the STAnDD framework has shown promising results for the future of the approach, with significant time reduction being the most important of them. The fact that the extraction was successfully conducted on the rib indicates that the integration of the rest of the wing box components and eventually the rest of the aircraft components will be a realizable task.

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