INREOG - A hybrid approach for more efficient airplane qualification
Overview
Background & policy context:
Aircraft and their components are under a constant pressure for innovation and higher efficiency. The more and more saturated market and tightening environmental standards force airlines to shorten aircraft renewal cycles, which are currently at about 40 years for commercial aircrafts and less for specific parts such as engines and on-board electronics. Shortening industrial development cycles thus is essential for the competitiveness of the aviation industry and their customers.
Objectives:
The INREOG project followed the objective to assess how computer-based methods and simulations can improve testing processes in the aircraft industry. Second, it aims at investigating how significant improvements in efficiency can be achieved by the combined application of experimental testing and simulation.
Methodology:
The assessment by the INREOG project started by going to the extreme: can contemporary fatigue testing of airplane parts be completely replaced by computer simulation models? For this step a complete aircraft with all relevant parts should be depicted in a single software application.
As it was assumed from the start that this will most likely not be possible, the second phase of the study looked at the question of how computer simulation can support the fatigue testing of aircraft modules. Options were developed and validated on the large scale structural test of the A400M MFT military transporter.
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