A NON-WEIGHT BASED, MANUFACTURING INFLUENCED DESIGN (MIND) METHODOLOGY FOR PRELIMINARY DESIGN

摘要

Manufacturing has traditionally focused on the late stages of aircraft design when the structure is already well defined. But advanced materials, new manufacturing processes, and globalization necessitate that manufacturing and design trade-offs be conducted earlier in the design process. This paper defines a new design methodology that incorporates appropriate, non-weight based manufacturing criteria during preliminary design to enable performance, structures, and manufacturing cost trade-offs. This methodology integrates a non-proprietary manufacturing tool, SEER-MFG, with design codes written in MATLAB into a multi-disciplinary environment using ModelCenter. The main cost drivers for manufacturing, such as ply and fastener count, are extracted from detailed designs and fed to SEER-MFG enabling preliminary design modeling and analysis. Surrogate modeling techniques are then used to visualize the data and facilitate multi-attribute decisions between different concepts.