Efficient Airframe Development: The Right Tools for the Job
by John O'Connor, VISTAGY Director of Product and Market Strategy
Thousands of pieces of unstructured information are generated in the airframe design-to-manufacturing process, which must be communicated accurately and completely to multiple teams, organizations, and suppliers through multiple design revisions. The tasks necessary to accurately define and share this information are both tedious and complex and, in many cases, are not automated or well-supported by commercial 3D CAD systems. Engineers are faced with finding ways to accurately and unambiguously capture specifications, verify that requirements are met, efficiently define the stages of the manufacturing process and ensure that the end product meets certification criteria.
This complexity, along with increasing pressure to profitably deliver high-quality products to market faster, puts enormous demands on engineers and their software. Specialized tools that reflect the unique terminology and processes used for airframe design are needed to help meet these requirements.
Specialized Problems Require Specialized Tools
Airframe design is very specialized work, requiring a wide range of information to be captured accurately and organized in an intuitive fashion. For non-geometric information such as joints, fastener types, grip lengths and sealant specifications to be useful in the product development process, it must be associated to geometry so it can be viewed and edited at the same time the geometry is being altered. Painstakingly entering individual specifications and callouts manually for thousands of fasteners, joints and detail parts culminates in reduced quality designs and extended schedules.
Airframe manufacturing is also very specialized. It demands accurate and fast consumption of engineering requirements into manufacturing plans. To be effective, manufacturing engineers need an automated link between design and manufacturing systems to efficiently consume engineering requirements into manufacturing definitions without errors. Using generic tools, engineers are required to manually consume individual specifications for thousands of fasteners, joints and detail parts—a tedious, time-consuming and error-prone process. For example, airframe assembly frequently uses unique manufacturing processes, such as match drilling, which require a definition of the intermediate states that subassemblies progress through to achieve the final assembly. The effort to document these individual states is complex and can be hard to manage, especially when there are changes to the design. This often results in schedule delays due to errors or unanticipated changes.
Integrate the Entire Airframe Development Process
VISTAGY's Airframe Development Environments™ provide solutions to these challenges. This powerful suite of software, which is integrated into commercial 3D CAD systems, enables world-class aircraft development by supporting the entire airframe design-to-manufacturing process with tools specifically created to tackle these difficult tasks.
The Airframe Design Environment™ (ADE) enables engineers to easily author in-depth design data for fasteners, details, joints and assemblies, creating complete 3D product definitions. ADE stores the design data, linked to the associated geometry, directly inside the commercial 3D CAD model. It automates repetitive design tasks such as calculating fastener edge distances and stack-up thicknesses, and allows for easy re-use of data for future programs. It also delivers fastener consumption reports to manufacturing, input to bill of material systems and critical inspection characteristics to quality planning applications.
The Airframe Manufacturing Environment™ (AME) creates, manages and shares the multiple digital manufacturing states required for developing airframes. It enables engineers to easily consume engineering requirements into assembly states and author detailed, fine-grain manufacturing data to support process planning activities. The AME easily accommodates design changes by automatically updating the manufacturing states. It also aids in tracking fastener consumption and shares that information with manufacturing and quality planning applications. The software's collaboration tools deliver essential data across the entire product development and manufacturing teams.
The result? A highly efficient process for delivering world-class aircraft on-schedule and at reduced cost.
Click here to take a tour of the VISTAGY Airframe Development Environments. For product information, click here, or send us an email.