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Improving the verification and certification process of the high lift system by introduction of virtual testing is one of the approaches to counter the challenges related to testing of future aircraft, in terms of performing more tests of more complex systems in less time. The quality of the applied modelling methods itself and the guarantee of a completely traceable simulation lifecycle management along the aircraft development are essential. The presentation shows how existing processes for the management of all test related data have to be extended to cover the specifics of using multi body simulation models for virtual tests related to high lift failure cases. Based on a demonstrator, MSC Software GmbH and Airbus developed and are still refining the SimManager based “High Lift System Virtual Test Portal”. This portal has to fulfil on the one side global requirements like data management, data traceability and workflow management.

Insufficient chip extraction often leads to disruptions of automated drilling processes and will have a negative impact on the surface qualities. One opportunity to avoid chip accumulation is based on a kinematically enforced chip breakage caused by sinusoidal axial oscillations of the drilling tool. Recent investigations have shown that the quality of chip extraction is, amongst others, considerably depending on the chip shape and mass which are defined by the cutting parameters feed, amplitude and frequency. So far only mechanical systems in the form of tool holders have been available on the market, which are restricted to a fixed frequency (oscillation frequency is coupled to the spindle speed). In the present study a spindle with magnetic bearings was used which allows to adjust the oscillation frequency independent of the spindle speed and therefore enables all opportunities to affect the generated chip shapes.

“Smart” refers to tools that are “specific, measurable, achievable, reasonable/realistic, and time bound.” Smart assembly tools are used in many industries, including automotive, aerospace, and space for measuring, inspecting, gauging, drilling, and installing all existing fastening systems. Inside the Industry 4.0 environment, these tools have a huge influence on Information and Communication Technology (ICT), assembly cost reduction, process control, and even the product and process quality. These four domains—and their undefined nature—are the focus of this SAE EDGE™ Research Report. The technical issues identified here need to be discussed, the goals clarifying the scope of the industry-wide need to be aligned, and the issues requiring standardization need prioritized. NOTE: SAE EDGE Research Reports are intended to identify and illuminate key issues in emerging, but still unsettled, technologies of interest to the mobility industry.

Glaciated icing conditions potentially leading to in-service event are often encountered in the vicinity of deep convective clouds. Nowcasting of these conditions with space-borne observations would be of a great help for improving flight safety and air-traffic management but still remains challenging. In the framework of the HAIC (High Altitude Ice Crystals) project, methods to detect and track regions of high ice water content from space-based geostationary and low orbit mission are investigated. A first HAIC/HIWC field campaign has been carried out in Australia in January-March 2014 to sample meteorological conditions potentially leading to glaciated icing conditions. During the campaign, several nowcasting tools were successfully operated such as the Rapid Development Thunderstorm (RDT) product that detects the convective areas from infrared geostationary imagery.

Industrial requirements imply optimizing the development cycle, reducing manufacturing costs and reaching marketable product maturity as fast as possible. The design stage often involves multiple sites and various partners. In this context, the use of computer simulation becomes absolutely necessary to meet industrial needs. Nevertheless, this activity can be effective only if it is integrated correctly in the industrial organization. In the aeronautical and space systems industry, mechanical specifications often require the use of composites reinforced by continuous carbon fibers. The goal of this article is to describe how, on a time frame of nearly twenty years, a series of scientific and technical tasks were carried out in partnership in order to develop, validate and implement Resin Transfer Molding (RTM) flow simulation and cure analysis for high performance composites. The research stage started at the university in 1991.

The work describes a concept application that aids a safety engineer to create a layup of equipment models by using an image scan of a schematic and a library of predefined standard component and their symbols. The approach uses image recognition techniques to identify the symbols within the scanned image of the schematic from a given library of symbols. Two recognition approaches are studied, one uses General Hough Transform; the other is based on pixel-level feature computation combining both structure and statistical features. The application allows the user to accept or edit the results of the recognition step and allows the user to define new components during the layup step. The tool then generates an output file that is compatible with a formal safety modeling tool. The identified symbols are associated to behavioral nodes from a model based safety tool.

In Aeronautic industry, when we launch a new industrialization for an aircraft sub assembly we always have the same questions in mind for drilling operations, especially when focusing on lean manufacturing. How can we avoid dismantling and deburring parts after drilling operation? Can a drilling centre perform all the tasks needed to deliver a hole ready to install final fastener? How can we decrease down-time of the drilling centre? Can a drilling centre be integrated in a pulse assembly line? How can we improve environmental efficiency of a drilling centre? It is based on these main drivers that AIRBUS has developed, with SPIE and SOS, a new generation of drilling centre dedicated for hard materials such as titanium, and high thicknesses. The first application was for the assembly of the primary structure of A350 engine pylons. The main solution that was implemented meeting several objectives was the development of orbital drilling technology in hard metal stacks.

In Aeronautic industry, when we launch a new industrialization for an aircraft sub assembly we always have the same questions in mind for drilling operations, especially when focusing on lean manufacturing. How can we avoid dismantling and deburring parts after drilling operation? Can a drilling centre perform all the tasks needed to deliver a hole ready to install final fastener? How can we simplify specific jigs used to maintain parts during drilling operations? How can we decrease down-time of the drilling centre? Can a drilling centre be integrated in a pulse assembly line? How can we improve environmental efficiency of a drilling centre? It is based on these main drivers that AIRBUS has developed, with SPIE and SOS, a new generation of drilling centre dedicated for hard materials such as titanium, and high thicknesses. The first application was for the assembly of the primary structure of A350 engine pylons.

In 1994, an ATR-72 crashed at Roselawn, Indiana, USA. It has been speculated that accident was due to Supercooled Large Droplet (SLD) icing. This accident led to a modification of the regulation rules with the definition of the Appendix O which includes freezing drizzle and freezing rain icing conditions. The associated NPRM (Notice of Proposed Rule Making) has been distributed to industry for comments on 29th June 2010 and could be applicable by beginning 2012. In order to comply with this new rule, the simulation tools, as Acceptable Means of Compliance, have to be improved and validated for these conditions. The paper presents the work performed within Airbus to review, improve and assess simulation tools capability to accurately predict physical phenomena related to SLD. It focuses in particular on splashing and bouncing phenomena which have been highlighted as the first order effects.

Fuel on-board dehydration during flight technologies has been modeled and experimentally studied on a laboratory testing setup in normal specific gas flow rates range of 0.0002-0.0010 sec-₁. Natural air evolution, ullage blowing and fuel sparging with dry inert gas have been studied. It has been shown that natural air evolution during aircraft climb provides a significant, substantial, but insufficient dehydration of fuel up to 20% relative. Ullage blowing during cruise leads to a constant, but a slow dehydration of fuel with sufficient column height concentration gradient. Dry inert gas sparging held after the end of the natural air evolution or simultaneously with natural air evolution provides rapid fuel dehydration to the maximum possible values. It potentially may eliminate water release and deposition in fuel to -50°C. It has been found that for proper dehydration, necessary and sufficient volume of dry inert gas to volume of fuel ratio is about 1.

Over the last few years, IT systems have quickly found their way onboard aircrafts, driven by the continuous pursuit of improved safety and efficiency in aircraft operation, but also in an attempt to provide the ultimate in-flight experience for passengers. Along with IT systems and communication links came IT security as a new factor in the equation when evaluating and monitoring the operational risk that needs to be managed during the operation of the aircraft. This is mainly due to the fact that security deficiencies can cause services to be unavailable, or even worse, to be exploited by intentional attacks or inadvertent actions. Aircraft manufacturers needed to develop new processes and had to get organized accordingly in order to efficiently and effectively address these new risks.

Modern aircraft, such as A380 or A350 for Airbus, are very well connected in flight to ground stations through wireless communications. For maintenance and operations purpose, the aircraft is programmed to send regularly information such as flight reports based on the BITE messages (Built-In Test Equipment) or standard reports based on the value of physical parameters. Moreover, Airbus is capable of sending requests (called uplinks) to the aircraft to retrieve the value of different parameters in almost real-time. This ability, associated with adequate process, improves significantly the reaction time of the diagnostic and prognostic solutions that Airbus can provide to its customers. Traditionally Health Monitoring is considered useful when the Potential to Functional failure (P-F) interval is greater than one flight cycle.

The aerospace manufacturing sector is continuously seeking automation due to increased demand for the next generation single-isle aircraft. In order to reduce weight and fuel consumption aircraft manufacturers have increasingly started to use more composites as part of the structure. The manufacture and assembly of composites poses different constraints and challenges compared to the more traditional aircraft build consisting of metal components. In order to overcome these problems and to achieve the desired production rate existing manufacturing technologies have to be improved. New technologies and build concepts have to be developed in order to achieve the rate and ramp up of production and cost saving. This paper investigates how to achieve the rib hole key characteristic (KC) in a composite wing box assembly process. When the rib hole KC is out of tolerances, possibly, the KC can be achieved by imposing it by means of adjustable tooling and fixturing elements.

Accurate calculation of the catch efficiency β is of paramount importance for any ice accretion calculation since β is the most important factor in determining the mass of ice accretion. A new scheme has been proposed recently in [1] for accurately calculating β on a discretized two-dimensional geometry based on the results of a Lagrangian droplet trajectory integrator (start and impact conditions). This paper proposes an extension to the algorithm in Ref. [1], which is applicable to three-dimensional surfaces with arbitrary surface discretization. The 3D algorithm maintains the positive attributes of the original 2D algorithm, namely mass conservation of the impinging water, capability to deal with overlapping impingement regions and with crossing trajectories, computational efficiency of the algorithm, and low number of trajectories required to reach good accuracy in catch efficiency.

Composite materials are increasingly being used in the manufacturing of structural components in aeronautics industry. A consequent light-weight design of CFRP primary structures requires adhesive bonding as the optimum joining technique but is limited due to a lack of adequate quality assurance procedures. The successful implementation of a reliable quality assurance concept for adhesive bonding within manufacturing and in-service environments will provide the basis for increased use of lightweight composite materials for highly integrated aircraft structures thus minimizing rivet-based assembly. The expected weight saving for the fuselage airframe is remarkable and therefore the driver for research and development of key-enabling technologies. The performance of adhesive bonds mainly depends on the physico-chemical properties of adherend surfaces.

Electroimpact has retrofitted two E4100 riveting gantry machines and two more are in process. These machines use the EMR (Electromagnetic Riveter) riveting process for the installation of slug rivets. We have improved the skin side EMR to provide fast and reliable results: reliability improved by eliminating a weekly shutdown of the machine. In paper 2015-01-2515 we showed the slug rivet injector using a Synchronized Parallel Gripper that provides good results over multiple rivet diameters. This injector is mounted to the skin side EMR so that the rivet injection can be done at any position of the shuttle table. The EMR is a challenging application for the fingers due to shock and vibration. In previous designs, fingers would occasionally be thrown out of the slots. To provide reliable results we redesigned the fingers retainer to capture the finger in a slotted plastic block which slides along the outside diameter of the driver bearing.

Traditional solutions developed for the aerospace industry must overcome challenges posed for automation systems like design, requalification, large manual content, restricted access, and tight tolerances. At the same time, automated systems should avoid the use of dedicated equipment so they can be shared between jigs; moved between floor levels and access either side of the workpiece. This article describes the development of a robotic system for drilling and inspection for small aerostructure manufacturing specifically designed to tackle these requirements. The system comprises three work packages: connection within the digital thread (from concept through to operational metrics including Statistical Process Control), innovative lightweight / low energy drill, and auto tool-change with in-process metrology. The validation tests demonstrating Technology Readiness Level 6 are presented and results are shown and discussed.

This paper presents the development of a high density packaging technology for wide band gap power devices, such as silicon carbide (SiC). These devices are interesting candidates for the next aircraft power electronic converters. Effectively they achieve high switching frequencies thanks to the low losses level. High switching frequencies lead to reduce the passive components size and to an overall weight reduction of power converters. Moreover, SiC devices may enable operation at junction temperatures around 250°C. The cooling requirement is much less stringent than for usual Si devices. This might considerably simplify the cooling system, and reduce the overall weight. To achieve the integration requirements for SiC devices, classical wire bonding interconnection is replaced by a stacked packaging using bump interconnection technologies, called sandwich. These technologies offer two thermal paths to drain heat out and present more power integration possibilities.

This second edition has been extensively updated to keep pace with the growing use of composite materials in commercial aviation. A worldwide reference for repair technicians and design engineers, the book is an outgrowth of the course syllabus that was developed by the Training Task Group of SAE's Commercial Aircraft Composite Repair Committee (CACRC) and published as SAE AIR 4938, Composite and Bonded Structure Technician Specialist Training Document. Topics new to this edition include: Nondestructive Inspection (NDI) Methods Fasteners for Composite Materials A Method for the Surface Preparation of Metals Prior to Adhesive Bonding Repair Design Although this book has been written primarily for use in aircraft repair other applications including marine and automotive are also covered.

The new edition of the well known Care and Repair of Advanced Composites, 3rd Edition, improves on the usefulness of this practical guide geared towards the aerospace industry. Keith B. Armstrong, the original lead author of the first edition was still in charge of this project, counting on the expert support of Eric Chesmar, senior composites specialist at United Airlines. Mr. Chesmar is also an active member of SAE International's CACRC (Commercial Aircraft Composite Repair Committee), an elite group of industry experts dedicated to the standardization, safety, security, and efficiency of composite repairs in the airline industry. Mr. Francois Museux (Airbus) and Mr. William F. Cole II also contributed. Care and Repair of Advanced Composites, 3rd Edition, presents a fully updated approach to the training syllabus recommended for repair design engineers and composite repair mechanics.