Search Results

Composite materials and structures are often avoided in general aviation vehicle applications because they are believed to be unnecessarily complex to design and analyze, and because manufacturing concerns often drive up cost and weight prior to component final delivery. In addition, concerns for component qualification are often cited, which relates to quality control and repeatability within manufacturing. These concerns may be readily overcome with modern software solutions that enable consideration of a significantly increased breadth of disciplines and definition of true three-dimensional geometry at the earliest stages of preliminary design. This paper addresses two such applications of knowledge-based software systems for composite materials and structures, wherein embedded knowledge capturing proven engineering practice is concurrently applied to design, analysis and manufacturing concerns.

Experience has shown that process and system level thinking enables significant reductions in design cycle time by avoiding technically correct but irrelevant calculations. Irrelevance often arises when the correct analysis is performed at the wrong stage in the product definition. Current iterative approaches to engineering design require considerable duplication of effort, much of which comes from modeling multiple design abstractions for varied levels and types of analyses. To ensure that appropriate domain knowledge is available at the appropriate time, skills and experience with tools that enable more robust trade studies for increasingly detailed design with inputs from increasingly diverse disciplines are required. Vehicle-focused efforts have broad appeal for attracting high quality, diverse students and facilitate strategic alignment of teaching and research.