Aircraft structural design and analysis

Moving from the fossil fuel powered aviation to next-generation aircraft with multiple energy carriers and architectures constitutes a massive challenge but is required to stay competitive. Future airframes will come equipped with disruptive technologies like hybrid-electric and hydrogen propulsion that represent a significant departure from the current technology.

The disruptive changes ahead of us cannot be solved with today’s process of isolated tools and teams. It will require much tighter integration between flight physics, aircraft structural design and analysis and testing teams.

You can break silos between engineering teams to achieve sustainable aviation. Download the white paper to learn more.

Airframe design for sustainable aviation

Methods of traditional airframe design must be adapted to achieve sustainable aviation. Engineers will need to design future airframes to integrate innovative technologies such as hybrid-electric and hydrogen propulsion systems. They will need to explore new configurations and performance ranges that have not yet been achieved in aviation.

Enabling these new configurations will require advanced capabilities to predict design parameters and performance at the aircraft level and sharing these with the partners and certification authorities. A virtual airframe design, integration, verification and validation platform is needed to scale and correlate flight and ground testing by leveraging simulation.

A connected airframe structural design and analysis approach

Learn about a connected airframe structural design and analysis approach to enable the evolution of sustainable aviation. Creating and verifying new airframe configurations will require extensive multidisciplinary optimization capabilities to predict the best design parameters and associated performance at the aircraft level. The computer-aided design (CAD) model should be crafted to support the efficient generation of many assembly or subassembly variants and their consumption for computational fluid dynamics (CFD), aero-elastic, structural and stress verification analysis, considering innovative manufacturing concepts as well.

Simcenter for airframe structural design and analysis

We have developed dedicated solutions that significantly speed up the airframe design and analysis process. Using Simcenter helps engineers concurrently create structural design and FEA models for load path calculations or local for fatigue and damage tolerance analysis. Using Simcenter also helps you create and use analytical stress calculations that consume information associatively from design, FEA or material databases.

Read the white paper to learn more.

Impact on the aircraft structural design and analysis workflow

To manage the impact on the aircraft structural design and analysis workflow, aircraft manufacturers need to move from today’s process of isolated tools and teams to much tighter integration between flight physics, structural design and analysis and testing teams. Improvements in the following areas are essential:

• Concurrently creating airframe structural designs and analysis models
• More efficient and traceable loads to reserve factor calculation process
• Closer collaboration between simulation and test teams
• An agile stress method creation and utilization toolbox