Aerospace design

Successful aircraft development requires cross-disciplinary design teams to deal with huge amounts of change traffic while developing a product. Increasing productivity is chief among the competencies of any competitive aerospace and defense company. However, as A&D products have become more complex, the established tools for aerospace design are ready for their next iteration. It is here that Siemens Xcelerator brings a new and better collection of capabilities necessary to support high-performance design processes for multidisciplinary teams. These immersive, in-context design methods can be delivered efficiently through SaaS deployments. Driving automation in this manner ensures seamless awareness of all changes, spanning both upstream and downstream operations. Therefore, as the design becomes more fully optimized through the development cycle, all stakeholders are kept informed and can rapidly address potential impacts on their areas of design authority.

Enhancing productivity in key areas like design, manufacturing, simulation and service can decrease expenses for products with extended lifespans, like aerospace and defense products. A multidisciplinary design and optimization approach presents an opportunity to add more reliability to products, consequently lowering the manufacturer's lifecycle costs. By fully exploring the design space and simulating manufacturability and realistic in-service performance for key A&D product types, the likelihood of product failure or the need for service decreases, resulting in reduced time and labor spent on rectifying issues.

A key factor in creating competitive advantage in aerospace product development is the speed of engineering processes. How fast a company moves through the development cycle is tightly linked to market leadership through introducing new technology faster. A multidisciplinary design and optimization approach is central to these ends by supporting faster, more efficient product development in A&D. Our solutions support the creation of digital twins connected by digital threads. Digital twins are high-fidelity, reusable representations of a design, its manufacturing processes or manufacturing resources. They are quickly created, easily managed and simply modified through the lifecycle of the product. Digital threads connect these digital twins, enabling their reuse and consumption. This digitalization framework automates the collaboration and multidisciplinary optimization activities necessary to rapidly develop the high-performance products at target cost, thereby enhancing competitive advantage.

Aerospace and defense engineers face the difficult task of making informed decisions about complex, highly engineered products and the challenge of meeting business demands. Siemens Immersive Engineering offers a solution to this dilemma through a multidisciplinary engineering approach that utilizes a fully immersive engineering process to understand and reconcile the impacts of design choices on the fit, form, function and fabricability of a product.

In aerospace product development, the marriage of insight and process is essential. Innovation is undeniably important, but its potential can only be fully realized within a robust framework of efficient processes. Siemens aircraft design solutions embed a collaboration framework into the product development process, creating a holistic understanding across disciplines whether they be electrical, mechanical, software, systems or manufacturing. This allows A&D companies to put product development at the core of their business strategy, a proven approach to enhancing growth and profitability.

Thousands and thousands of pieces of information are generated during the development processes for A&D products. This information must be delivered accurately and completely through multiple revisions of designs to build end products. Often the tasks necessary to define and communicate this information are tedious and complex. In many cases, they are not automated, but this data must be efficiently reused in a series of optimization activities that cross disciplinary boundaries between electrical, mechanical, software, manufacturing and other teams.

Next-generation A&D products have reached a level of complexity that requires more advanced automation and optimization to achieve program and performance targets and meet sustainability goals. Siemens' digitalization capabilities enable the kind of multidisciplinary design and optimization activities that make these complex problems more tractable and sustainable.