Abstract

The aerospace industry can benefit from increasing the use of engineering simulation to augment and/or replace physical testing as the means of compliance for flight vehicle certification and qualification. Drivers in the industry include an increasingly competitive worldwide market that focuses on customer experience, greater demands on efficient design to deliver the best customer value, and meeting societal expectations regarding environmental sustainability. Winning this competitive race requires mastering growth in system complexity, delivering high quality, and above all ensuring safety. Physical tests are often on the critical path of program schedules, driving up development and certification cost, and program risk. Today, certification requirements are responsible for a significant portion of an aircraft manufacturer's development cost. This paper explores opportunities for aerospace manufacturers to streamline vehicle compliance processes with advances in simulation. The paper outlines the use of multiscale approaches to build confidence in simulation accuracy, and the need to support long-term simulation data persistence. The benefits of a collaborative software platform to ensure simulation governance and facilitate model conformity are also described. Simulation and design should be tightly associated with automated model updates in order to enable data-driven decisions from concept trades, preliminary and detailed design, to certification. Engineering simulation software covers the breadth of physical phenomena: structural analysis, electromagnetics, aerodynamics, heat transfer, vibro-acoustics and more. Aerospace simulation complexity spans from system-level models to time-accurate simulations with millions of degrees of freedom. In airframe development, analysis applications include aerodynamic modeling, external loads, internal loads, sub-system structural validation, and airframe structural vulnerability. Over time, the industry has gained increasing confidence in simulation to accurately predict a vehicle’s physical response and performance, which has led to greater use of simulation to demonstrate regulatory compliance. Simulation can be strategically leveraged to reduce program risks and cost while streamlining physical test activities. Simulation capabilities increasingly demonstrate equivalent or more accurate results than physical test. Simulation can be used to replace hazardous tests or complement physical tests covering a few operational conditions to cover the entire operational envelope. Certification agencies are supportive of simulation as a means of reducing and/or replacing physical tests where economically attractive, provided simulation is verified to be as accurate. The paper describes capabilities required for an IT platform to support the proper simulation credibility assurance framework within the context of aircraft development and certification. We also include two industrial case studies to illustrate how engineering simulation has been used to reduce vehicle development time and certification cost.