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Aircraft cabin systems, especially cabin management systems (CMS) have to cope with frequent cabin changes during their lifecycle. This includes not only layout rearrangements and technological upgrades during the service, but also extensive CMS customizations and product variations before aircraft delivery. Therefore it is inevitable for the CMS to be highly changeable and offer an easy and agile change process. Today's CMS solutions face this challenge with configurable system architectures. Although such architectures offer a vast change domain, they usually come with time consuming and error prone change processes. This paper introduces an adaptive avionics software architecture that enables the CMS to cope with cabin changes highly automatically and with minimal human interactions. The adaptation is performed during an on ground organization phase, in which system changes are detected and evaluated by the CMS itself.

For integrating Life Cycle Assessment into the design process it is more and more necessary to generate models of single life cycle steps respectively manufacturing processes. For that reason it is indispensable to develop parametric processes. With such disposed processes the aim could only be to provide a tool where parametric environmental process models are available for a designer. With such a tool and the included models a designer will have the possibility to make an estimation of the probable energy consumption and needed additive materials for the applied manufacturing technology. Likewise if he has from the technical point of view the opportunity, he can shift the applied joining technology in the design phase by changing for instance the design.

The costs for development and production of draw dies for car outer panels are extremely high and should be reduced. Furthermore it is necessary to reduce the time for developing, designing and producing the dies for the production of parts. This paper discusses new press techniques, die designs and an adjustment program for press operators. The trend goes to single action presses with CNC-controlled multipoint cushion systems in the press table and to special designed dies. These systems lead to a more robust and reproducible forming process with improved product quality. This paper deals with: Cushion Systems, New Binder Designs for Draw Dies for Sheet Metal Automotive Parts, New Computer Program to Adjust the Blankholder Forces of Modern Hydraulic Cushion Systems of Single Action Presses and Pressure Measurement for Detecting the Pressure between the Blank and the Binders of Draw Dies for Sheet Metal Automotive Parts.

According to the present state of knowledge, the use of “Tailored Blanks” with different sheet thicknesses and/or grades represents an interesting manufacturing alternative in the design and development of sheet metal parts in the automotive industry. In order to assess the forming behavior, fundamental research was conducted on laser and mash seam welded blanks. Based on this experimental findings, a segmented draw die was designed and built to determine the limits of the metal forming process by deep drawing of car body parts. The results with this draw die showed that a uniform blankholder pressure must be guaranteed during the forming process in the flange region of the part. This necessitated definite slots in the region of the weld line for the mash seam welded blanks. Furthermore, a die concept was presented to enable an equalization of both sheet thickness steps and sheet thickness fluctuations, without requiring replacement of the respective draw die components.

During sheet metal forming processes, the friction conditions have a decisive influence on forming limits, the robustness of the production process and the quality of the parts produced, with significant forces required to overcome friction between the sheet and the tools. If lot-to-lot reproducibility is to be guaranteed, an appropriate method of characterizing the sheet surface topography is needed to monitor the sheet metal fabrication process. Newly developed optical measurement techniques and computer workstation technology are presented which enable the topography of sheet surfaces to be described in three dimensions.

When drawing non-axissymmetric sheet metal parts it is necessary to control the flow of material between the lower and upper binder in such a manner that prevents the occurrence of both tears and wrinkles in the drawn part. One possibility for the control of the material flow is through the deliberate adjustment of the normal forces. If one can measure the flow-in of the material into the die cavity as a function of punch stroke with a special sensor, and if this information can be used to produce an empirical flow-in curve over the stroke for good parts, then it is possible to construct a closed- loop BHF control system. Building such control system is feasible by implementation of special dies with hydraulically supported segmented binders. This system allows an automatic response to a change in the friction conditions.

In this paper the effects of pulsating blankholder forces in deep draw processes for sheet metal parts are discussed. Areas with and without tangential compressive stresses in the flanges, which are located between the binders, are discussed separately. Areas without tangential compressive stresses can be simulated by a special friction strip-draw test using a pulsating normal force ( representing the blankholder force ). Investigations using this equipment show that by pulsating blankholder forces it is possible to avoid galling and to reduce the friction force. Areas with tangential compressive stresses can be simulated by deep drawing axissymmetric cups using a pulsating blankholder force. Investigations with this equipment show that without increasing the danger of wrinkling the friction forces can be reduced by pulsating blankholder forces, when a certain frequency limit is reached.

In cooperation with industrial companies at the Institute for Metal Forming Technology (IFU) of the University of Stuttgart, Germany, a new press concept specially for hydroforming tubes and extrusions was developed. The press has a capacity of 3500 tons closing force and a press table size of 2500 mm × 900 mm. A great reduction in costs can be achieved by integrating spacers between the frame of the press and the ram. This paper introduces this new press.

Today, LRI is a proven manufacturing technology for both small and large scale structures (e.g. sailboats) where, in most cases, experience and limited prototype experimentation is sufficient to get a satisfactory design. However, large scale aerospace (and other) structures require reproducible, high quality, defect free parts, with excellent mechanical performance. This requires precise control and knowledge of the preforming (draping and manufacture of the composite fabric preforms), their assembly and the resin infusion. The INFUCOMP project is a multi-disciplinary research project to develop necessary Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) tools for all stages of the LRI manufacturing process. An ambitious set of developments have been undertaken that build on existing capabilities of leading drape and infusion simulation codes available today. Currently the codes are only accurate for simple drape problems and infusion analysis of RTM parts using matched metal molds.

State-of-the-art avionics systems are standardized, e.g. the computing system of the flying vehicle is composed of pre-defined and pre-qualified modules of a standardized avionics platform. Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) is the most popular representative, but not the only one. Two challenges of standardized avionics platform are system design and configuration. Since the high numbers of functions, modules, and constraints for modern air vehicles, bringing up the optimal system architecture is a difficult job if carried out manually. The subsequent process of creating millions of configuration parameters is time consuming and error prone. Both issues are similar and are, in general, processable by algorithms. Algorithms proved to provide significant support for current system design issues and might be mandatory in future, when avionics become self-organizing and the design and configuration are derived by the platform itself.

The development and qualification of distributed and highly safety-critical avionics systems implicate high efforts and risks. The resulting costs usually limit implementations like fly-by-wire systems to the military or commercial airliner domains. The aim of previous and ongoing research at the Institute of Aircraft Systems at University of Stuttgart is the reduction of these costs and therefore open up their benefits, inter alia, to general aviation, remotely piloted or unmanned aircraft. An approach for an efficient development is the application of a platform based development which supports the reuse of software and hardware components. The Flexible Platform adopts this approach. It is accompanied by a tool suite which automates the design and parameter instantiation, documentation generation and the generation of verification artifacts for a platform instance. This paper presents the approach for the requirement document generation compliant to ARP4754A and DO-178C.