Accelerating the systems design process

According Boeing’s long-term forecast, Current Market Outlook 2013-2032, the in-service commercial aircraft fleet will double in size from 20,310 airplanes in 2013 to 41,240 by 2032. More than 35,000 new fuel-efficient airplanes will be needed to meet airline industry needs, including 41% that will replace older models.

Ten years ago, the aerospace market was dominated by two aircraft giants. That situation is changing as new manufacturers in China, Russia, Japan, and Brazil are eager to take their share of the growing worldwide market. These entrants expect more support from their component suppliers, so they have no choice but to expand their competencies to encompass entire aircraft systems. Therefore, component suppliers are more involved in system configuration and integration as they take more responsibility and share the inherent risks of an increasingly shorter development cycle.

In this context, simulation becomes an indispensable part of the development process, not only for the component and system design, but also for architecture configuration, systems integration, and validation.
 

Optimizing the systems design process

Aeroconseil specializes in high value-added services throughout the entire aircraft lifecycle, from engineering to operations. The company supports aircraft and rotorcraft manufacturers such as Airbus, Bombardier, Mitsubishi Aircraft Corp., and Airbus Helicopters; system and equipment suppliers such as Safran Group, Liebherr Aerospace, and Thales Group, as well as airline companies, aircraft owners, lessors, and maintenance centers.

Aeroconseil has developed expertise in aircraft systems, including electro-hydro-mechanical equipment and systems, avionics, electronics, and embedded software. The company’s design work focuses on systems design, integration, and validation. Simulation is considered an important catalyst, enabling Aeroconseil to optimize its systems design process.

Three years ago, Aeroconseil had to determine which tools would best enable its engineers to accurately represent and easily connect multi-domain systems as well as to analyze the behavior of these systems when they were integrated into the airplane. Another concern was exporting models into a broader simulation environment.

To meet these challenges, Aeroconseil decided to add LMS Imagine.Lab Amesim software from product lifecycle management (PLM) specialist Siemens PLM Software to its toolkit. This platform already implemented at multiple aircraft and equipment manufacturers, so it would enable Aeroconseil to analyze multi-domain systems and easily perform co-simulation.
 

Benchmarking LMS Amesim

Electro-hydro-mechanical systems stood out as the first application area for LMS Amesim, so Aeroconseil chose the flight control actuation system as a starting point for its work with the software. The company wanted to make sure that LMS Amesim met systems integration requirements with a view to extending its use to other systems.

The flight control and guidance systems department at Aeroconseil is in charge of developing fly-by-wire flight control and autopilot systems. Involved in different design project phases from pre-design to the first validation phase at the beginning of the second part of the V-cycle, this department was assigned to carry out the pilot project.

The goal was to model different types of actuators – such as hydraulic, electro-hydraulic, and electro-mechanical – and to connect those technologies and analyze their behavior and system performance once integrated into aircraft.
 

Providing systems design and integration

Aeroconseil chose LMS Amesim for its multi-domain modeling capabilities, an important part of the company’s systems design and integration work. The software scripting capabilities enable Aeroconseil’s specialists to run simulation batches.

“What really differentiates LMS Amesim from other tools is its prebuilt and validated component models that allow design engineers to significantly reduce component modeling and validation efforts,” says Franck Dietrich, the tools, simulation, and integration team leader at Aeroconseil. “The LMS Amesim industry-specific libraries are also an advantage.”

Dietrich notes, “With its physics-based modeling, LMS Amesim is organized in a way that is very close to real systems, unlike other tools in which the representations of real systems are less intuitive.”

In order to fully exploit advantages for systems integration, Aeroconseil is currently studying interoperability issues so it can interface it with other simulation platforms. Another key issue is to choose an adequate level of modeling for a better tradeoff between accuracy and computer processing time when running complex simulations. To accomplish that, Aeroconseil is investigating which parameters can be sacrificed to adapt the same model according to the goal of a specific analysis.

Setting ambitious common goals

“Our cooperation with Siemens PLM Software allows us to strengthen our expertise in multi-domain systems simulation, acquire new competencies, provide our customers with innovative solutions, and address new markets,” says Didier Dorne, business manager at Aeroconseil. “The combination of Siemens PLM Software’s and Aeroconseil’s competencies is the main added value of this collaboration for our customers.”

He adds, “With LMS Amesim being employed by leading aircraft market players, Siemens PLM Software and Aeroconseil’s challenge today is to overcome systems integration issues by developing model consistency throughout the development cycle, and by allowing engineers to easily adapt them to different design phases and various types of studies.”

Moreover, since mastering the certification process is one of Aeroconseil’s competitive advantages, another potential area of cooperation could be the use of LMS Amesim when preparing certification documents.

Siemens PLM Software
www.plm.automation.siemens.com

LMS Imagine.Lab Amesim
www.siemens.com/plm/lms-amesim

Aerosconseil
www.aeroconseil.com