Interface-Driven Multidisciplinary Design of Large-Scale Aircraft Structures.
Abstract
This report presents Phase I research to develop an Interface-Driven Design Manager (IDM) that greatly reduces the design cycle time for affordable composite aircraft. The IDM represents a first attempt to fully integrate powerful new interface element and 3-D interactive graphics technology into a single design environment to automate the assembly and analysis of multicomponent global-local models for faster, more accurate composite airframe design. These emerging technologies have the potential for making multidisciplinary design optimization of large-scale composite structures practical and for providing new levels of design automation that are currently not possible. The IDM provides a graphical environment for rapidly assembling global-local models, as well as other complex multicomponent airframe models, from pre-meshed 'stock' components stored in a relational database, without concern for mesh compatibility. The IDM enables the designer to automatically insert components or regions with a highly refined mesh into the coarse mesh of a global model using interface elements. This provides two substantial benefits: (1) detailed local models can be used without remeshing the entire structure thereby substantially reducing the associated engineering cost; and (2) higher accuracy can be achieved in critical regions without substantial increases in computational cost. Both of these benefits make it practical to use higher-fidelity models earlier in the design cycle so that primary structures which are truly optimized for the application of affordable composites are achieved.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Feb 01, 1997
- Accession Number
- ADA330548
Entities
People
- David R. Oakley
- Graham S. Rhodes
- Lonny B. Kruger
Organizations
- Applied Research Associates (United States)