Optimizing aircraft wire harness design
Grappling with constant change, budgetary constraints and increasingly stringent regulations, aerospace and defense (A&D) product manufacturers are under tremendous pressure to do more with less and faster. As you seek to improve product performance and functionality by replacing legacy mechanical systems with electrification and software, you face numerous challenges related to quality, delivery and cost.
Read this white paper to learn how optimizing your wire harness design can be the secret to developing successful A&D products.
Three key challenges of aircraft wire harness design
The aerospace industry is undergoing a tremendous amount of change. Many aerospace programs are either over budget, late or both. The pressure to reduce program costs and accelerate schedules while meeting requirements is one of the biggest challenges. At the same time, aerospace programs are becoming increasingly complex and highly integrated. This increased complexity creates challenges in designing, manufacturing and certifying new products, and bringing them to market quickly.
Three key challenges of aircraft wire harness design are quality, delivery and cost. This white paper looks at the traditional approach to harness design and a new approach that can better meet the challenges of quality, product deliver and cost reduction. With better processes and tools, you can reduce your engineering effort. When you eliminate mistakes through the design lifecycle, you can significantly reduce rework, minimize scheduling risk and eliminate non-value-added costs and waste.
Aircraft wire harness design digitalization
Forward-looking organizations are implementing a shift toward digitalization. A digital twin of the entire aircraft for multiple design disciplines can be connected so information can be accessed directly or transferred digitally to create a common digital thread, supporting the flow of information up and down the design and manufacturing chain. By creating a virtual copy of the design, the harness can be validated electronically against design rules, eliminating the need to manually transfer and transcribe information between the design disciplines.
Using a digital twin enables the integration of disciplines, teams and domains for seamless data sharing, reducing delays during handover. It enables early and frequent analysis to reduce risk by validating systems prior to and during implementation. Teams can optimize designs, production and product utilization using simulations while ensuring requirements traceability.
When wire harness design is included in electrical system design, simulations and analysis can be performed without the use of complex mathematical models, product prototyping or mental gymnastics. Rather than being reactive and scrambling to fix errors, teams can be proactive and detect potential problems early. As a result, quality is improved, delivery is accelerated and costs are reduced.
Benefits of using Capital for aircraft wire harness design
Capital Harness Designer enables the digital exchange of design data, eliminating errors, rework and delivery delays. Since the design process is digitally connected across disciplines, teams benefit from model-based writing design and the ability to sync design details from the wiring diagram to the mechanical engineering team.
By enabling design teams to create and leverage a digital twin throughout wire harness design and manufacturing, Capital delivers:
- Higher quality due to rejection of error-prone manual methods
- Data correctness when not exposed to manual iterations
- Urgent updates with faster connected processes
- Enhanced management of growing complexity
The benefits of using Capital for wire harness design include:
- Automate and manage: Build a solid foundation and take advantage of all the opportunities that come from a seamless data flow.
- Reduce program risk: Reach the planned level of quality, timeliness and profitability.
- Avoid iterations: No more costly tryouts, reworks or delays – achieve first-time-right manufacturing.