Conceptual Design of Fibre Metal Laminate Fuselage Panels

Conceptual Design of Fibre Metal Laminate Fuselage Panels

Banerji, Sagarika (TU Delft Aerospace Engineering)

la Rocca, G. (mentor)
Wildemast, Jacques (mentor)

Delft University of Technology

Aerospace Engineering | Flight Performance and Propulsion

2018-01-11

With improvements in aviation technology, design requirements to be full-filled have also increased exponentially. This in turn influences the complexity of design process, along with the time and effort required for it. The problem, for this research, has been set up with respect to challenges faced at Fokker Aerostructures, during in-proposal design of fuselage panels made from Fibre Metal Laminates (FML). FML technology allows material tailoring that offers substantial weight saving with bigger part dimensions. This trait of material
tailoring poses a complex design challenge in the time constrained in-proposal design phase. The objective of this phase, is to explore the solution space in order to come up with a winning proposal at a profitable cost. To tackle the challenges experienced, this research work establishes phase-I of a three phased project, proposed for implementation of full scale optimisation. The first phase is concerned with formalising the product and process knowledge of the laminate design, and bringing out the benefits of automation in a process largely
treated as creative. For this a KBE application, called the PANADEE-II is developed. This tool aims to isolate all creative tasks to be performed by experts, and automate all repetitive and non-creative tasks around it.

PANADEE-II is capable of quickly generating multiple designs while keeping the designer in-loop. Dividing the design challenges into smaller Constraint Satisfaction Problems(CSP), it uses heuristic techniques of trial and error to find solutions for individual problems. Further, by experimenting with designs adapted to
different design trait combinations, it performs general solution space searches. In doing so, it quadruples the number of design points tested as compared to the original manual process. This, along with a 28% smallerblead time, and 18% reduction in required expert time, greatly increase opportunities for design studies and manual optimisation. For a part manufacturer like Fokker Aerostructure, this serves a competitive advantage, as the current design process allows study of limited designs(1 or 2), offering no feel of the actual available
solution space or how the performance of selected design ranks in it. On the longer run, PANADEE-II has laid down a foundation for implementing a full scale design optimisation, including processes that have been currently isolated as creative for experts.

FML
design automation
conceptual design

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:97e969ff-c515-4e97-a5a5-c495e15807e9

2023-12-31

Student theses

master thesis

© 2018 Sagarika Banerji