Leveraging Teamcenter and NX to digitally transform the entire engineering process from concept to production

Adopting a modular aircraft approach

In the aerospace and defense (A&D) industry, training pilots can be a very long and expensive process that involves many different platforms made by various manufacturers. The aircraft that embody these platforms continue to get faster, bigger and more expensive. Each aircraft has its own maintenance processes, manufacturers, supply chain, tools and so on. This can lead to significant operational burdens, further affirming the need for a more adaptable and forward-thinking approach to aircraft design and procurement.

AERALIS, a UK military light jet developer, is setting out to revolutionize aircraft development by creating customizable fleets tailored to specific mission requirements. The company is currently working to develop the world’s first modular military jet named ‘Phoenix’, which AERALIS believes will break the curve on light jet and training jet procurement lifecycle costs. The company will build this modular jet around a Common Core Fuselage (CCF) concept, which can have different engine and wing attachments and be tuned to achieve different performance characteristics depending on mission requirements.

AERALIS’ ground-breaking offering is named AERSYSTEM, which includes three core components. The first is AERALIS’ Smart Integrated Digital Enterprise (AERSIDE), which centralizes and leverages data throughout the aircraft’s lifecycle, facilitating more seamless collaboration and optimization from design to operation. With a focus on the comprehensive digital twin, AERSIDE delivers solutions to enhance training effectiveness, operational capability and cost efficiency for air forces and defense organizations globally. AERALIS Open Systems Avionics (AEROSA) offers an interchange of software system components without the need to re-certify the entire system; this solution enables modularity of sensor loadouts and allows easier adoption of new technologies in the future. AERCORE is the final component of AERSYSTEM that combines the common core fuselage system with an array of module suites to create role-specific aircraft configurations.

AERALIS’ other offering is AERFLEX, a flexible military jet ‘aircraft as a service’. AERFLEX is a defense light air support service that, when used with AERSYSTEM, can deliver fleets of reconfigurable aircraft, as and when required, through partnering with trusted Service Partners. “AERFLEX gives optionality to expand the service to Red Air, Surrogacy and Display Team variants and provides huge flexibility and cost saving benefits.” says Charlie Jones, digital program manager for AERALIS.

AERALIS has been embarking on a detailed design for its first variant, which is the Advanced Jet Trainer variant. In the last few years of developing these solutions and working towards Phoenix, the AERALIS team realized there was a digital opportunity to speed up aircraft development and optimize its usage. AERALIS is in a partnership with Siemens Digital Industries Software to use various solutions such as Teamcenter® software and NX™ software to achieve these goals. Teamcenter and NX are part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services.

In the A&D industry currently, a lot of maintenance is done with multiple manuals and much of the fleet optimization is done by the operator themselves, which creates a lot of disaggregated data that no one is using to optimize processes. AERALIS saw an opportunity where the toolsets and the learning were starting to mature in A&D, but the adoption wasn’t there because many of the big players have legacy systems that would make adoption very slow. “Because we were a startup, we were a greenfield site. We were able to adopt digital processes from day one,” says Jones. From the beginning of the process, AERALIS can have a comprehensive digital twin and provide customers with the same to reduce the cost curve and increase the ability of the aircraft delivered. Due to this, AERALIS was looking for a digital partner who had the capabilities to deliver the AERALIS vision of complete digitalized engineering with true end-to-end digital engineering across the entire program. “The NX integration with Teamcenter allowed AERALIS to adopt a collaborative approach from the start of our design efforts. We’ve now started looking at adopting some of the newer products around MBSE, safety and design optimization which look promising,” says Jones.

As AERALIS has digitally transformed its own processes, the company recognizes that partners and suppliers they work with may not yet be as far along in the digital transformation process. For example, AERALIS could help a customer optimize a fleet, pass them the flight data and advise them when they need to do maintenance, but is the customer quite ready for that tech adoption yet? To combat this hesitation to digital maturity, Jones mentions, “Working with Siemens closely has helped us build a process that is familiar to regulators and operators around the world, while capitalizing on the digital opportunities that exist by using world-class digital engineering and creating digital models from the very start.”

Simulation of airflow over AERALIS’ Phoenix Aircraft. Image courtesy of AERALIS.

Leveraging Teamcenter to expand the digital enterprise

AERALIS is using various Siemens solutions to expand its digital enterprise, specifically leveraging Teamcenter as its digital thread backbone. AERALIS is building a digital enterprise that allows them to efficiently and quickly design, develop, manufacture and certify a family of modular jets. On top of that, it must be an ecosystem that monitors each air system’s operation to aid through life support to ensure continuing airworthiness. AERALIS found that Teamcenter had not just the toolset, but also the ambition and subject matter expertise to entirely integrate with AERSIDE, establishing product lifecycle management (PLM) as the digital thread backbone. The company plans to leverage Teamcenter to manage their design and engineering bill-of-materials (BOMs), including the management of product variants.

“Siemens was also clearly motivated to collaborate intelligently, and effectively help facilitate the AERSIDE journey, demonstrated through their continuous support and configuration of Teamcenter to our requirements, really flexing the digital thread,” says Callum Watson, lead PLM and design tools engineer for AERALIS. Currently, AERALIS has several key suppliers, contractors and design partners working with AERALIS’ engineers using Teamcenter and NX to do live design on the aircraft. Hamble Aerostructures saw this shared vision and adopted NX, displacing a competitor’s product for work on AERALIS. “We can work with multiple partners, all designing different elements of the aircraft simultaneously using NX and it has improved our efficiency”, says Jones.

Embarking on collaborative design work with Hamble Aerostructures required either a Teamcenter integration with their existing computer-aided design (CAD) setup, which could have been expensive and complex, or a whole new approach. AERALIS saw an opportunity to trial NX with a smaller, agile design team allowing them to explore NX and its capabilities. In about five months, AERALIS went from just learning to use Teamcenter to having an environment where the team could work collaboratively with design partners and share requirements efficiently.

AERALIS’ Modular Twin Engine Variant. Image courtesy of AERALIS.

Using NX to streamline CAD processes

The AERALIS team also uses several other features of NX to streamline their CAD engineering processes.

“NX is a tried and proven CAD tool already established in the aerospace domain, and yet they have even more focus on their roadmap towards better tailoring NX to the aerospace industries’ requirements,” says Watson. “Being able to utilize CAD with a PLM managed ecosystem has enabled us to stand up a collaborative design environment with both national and international design partners while maintaining good practice in terms of configuration control and commercial rule-based access. In addition, the integration threads our parts, assemblies and our bills of material into the digital thread alongside our requirements and systems models, among other elements.”

In addition, AERALIS also leverages NX to simplify the modeling of aerostructures, frames, ribs and spars to support collaborative design efforts. They also use WAVE Geometry Linker to control geometric interfaces shared among design partners, ensuring a single source of truth and facilitating LH/RH part management without duplication.

Another critical tool AERALIS utilizes is assembly arrangements, which proved to be an incredibly useful function when designing a multiconfiguration, multivariant product. It enables AERALIS’ CAD engineers to assemble a number of design solutions for each and quickly switch between them in their assembly navigator. Whether this be different powerplant solutions and their structure, single or twin, or even different compression weights of landing gear, the AERALIS team can quickly model and analyze ideas in the same space.

CheckMate has also been instrumental in enforcing modeling standards across design partners, automating checks and freeing up human resources for higher-level tasks. Extraction paths allowed for better understanding of systems installation and maintenance accessibility, crucial for designing user-friendly products. Human modeling features aided in cockpit design by providing anthropometrically linked models for simulation and input from test pilots, enhancing design iteration efficiency. HD3D tools, particularly visual reporting and requirements validation, help facilitate analysis and verification of design specifications. Clearance Analysis, another tool within NX, provides the AERALIS team with safety standards by evaluating system design safety distances. NX Join/PMI features support downstream processes, enhancing efficiency in manufacturing and collaborative design efforts. Overall, these features enable AERALIS to optimize their design workflow, ensuring accuracy, collaboration and compliance with standards.

The AERALIS Advanced Jet Trainer. Image courtesy of AERALIS.

Looking ahead to sustainability and a digital approach

AERALIS has and will continue to use Siemens solutions to drive its open systems avionics architecture because of the streamlined process and sustainability benefits. “We can adopt new technology far more rapidly and we can adopt both new hardware and new software far more quickly because of how we’re building this aircraft from day one, which is with an open systems architecture,” says Jones. “Where we need to update some software or a new bit of hardware comes along, it’s much quicker to adopt and that will give us massive savings in the environmental impact of flying in general.”

AERALIS plans to continue using the Siemens Xcelerator solutions as they work towards developing Phoenix and future offerings. Looking ahead, the AERALIS offering will eventually include a full range of crewed and uncrewed aircraft. They will continue adopting various solutions within the Siemens Xcelerator business platform including Opcenter, HEEDS and other Siemens solutions that will help them drive their digital backbone. “AERALIS has such a strong vision that aligns with Siemens goal of a digital thread with a single source of truth. We will continue to work together to deliver that.” says Jones.