Novel Extensible Design Approaches for Advanced Aircraft Composite Structural Architectures (MSC P4168)

Among the factors that inhibit the use of composite materials in both general aviation aircraft and DoD platforms are the relatively high cost of engineering and certification. Unless manufacturers control risk when introducing new or advanced materials and processes for aircraft, the potential benefits will be lost to the industry. For small commercial applications the problem is compounded by the desire to use low-cost fabrication processes that cannot rely on the existing experience base for autoclave cured graphite/epoxy pre-pregs and the lack of engineering resources that exist at larger major transport manufacturers. This project addresses these problems by demonstrating a standardization methodology which will enable creation of a parametric design catalog for structural elements which facilitates pre-approval, or conditional approval, from the Federal Aviation Administration or other certifying agency for a bounded design space. Probabilistic design tools will be used to isolate and quantify uncertainty in the structural component materials, processing, and design. Surrogate models of these quantities will then be constructed, and validated by experiments. The resulting response surfaces allow for the combined failure probability of the parametric standardized structural element to be efficiently calculated for any design permutation using Monte Carlo sampling. All parametric modeling surrogate data used to account for geometric, material, and process induced statistical variability will be part of an open extensible database which will be continuously updated thus allowing for a significant reduction in the number of tests required for certification of new aircraft designs.