Environment for Integrated Design and Analysis of Composite Structures

An integrated design and analysis environment is proposed based on an object-oriented, web-enabled, multidisciplinary, distributed framework supporting the design, analysis, sizing, and production planning of advanced composite structures throughconceptual, preliminary and detailed stages of the engineering process. This process is seamlessly integrated into a unified modeling environment supporting vehicle structural and substructure component layout, configuration, design, and integratedaero-structural analysis. The system encompasses many technology areas including: laminate definition and analysis, 3D composites, integrated substructure, material modeling (including high temperature), fabrication planning, certification by analysis,trade study sensitivity, and local as well as global optimization. The platform independent modular architecture of the environment enables and integrates innate automated dependency tracking, demand-driven computation, geometric modeling, parametricfeature-based design, meshing, analysis, costing, and post processing. Successful development of this system will reduce cycle time, impact engineering and production cost, and enable quick response to the development of composite designs. The adoptionand deployment of this framework could potentially offer at least a 50% reduction in preliminary design time of composite structures. The primary objectives are to research the requirements and develop the functional specifications for the proposedintegrated composite structures design and analysis environment. As a result of the proposed system development, the payoff for the DoD would be substantial. Successful development of this system will reduce cycle time and impact engineering andproduction cost and enable quick response to the fast-paced development of composite designs and related processes. Various DoD programs can benefit from a system to assist in the concept and validation stages to predict and assess engineering designs andmanufacturing processes. Such a system will have a beneficial impact on various applications in the design-to-production automation of airplane and missile systems, in addition to a number of applications in the automotive and commercial aerospaceindustries. The system can specifically benefit such programs as the Future Strike Vehicle, Space Operations Vehicle (SOV), Uninhabited Combat Air Vehicles (UCAV), as well as existing and new fighter aircraft. Based on TechnoSoft's experience withprevious applications, it is projected that the adoption and deployment of this framework will offer at least a 50% reduction in preliminary design time when starting a design from scratch, and more than 95% reduction in design time when starting from aprevious design where parametric studies are performed and only modest changes are made in the design intent. TechnoSoft plans to transition the proposed system into the development, marketing, and support of a product for integrated composite structuredesign and analysis. This framework will support a collaborative design and analysis environment for seamlessly integrating various tools and engineering processes from different disciplines.