Parametric Datamodel for Collaborative Preliminary Aircraft Engine Design

Abstract

An essential aspect of the collaborative multidisciplinary preliminary design process of aircraft engines is the involvement of a large number of experts from different disciplines and the usage of numerous tools and workflows. This is a major challenge, especially in the area of data management, as large amounts of data are generated that have to be exchanged and traced via a multitude of interfaces. The purpose of the paper is to present an approach of a central data model as a vehicle for data management in collaborative aircraft engine preliminary design. The first part describes the general structure and abstract definition of the developed data model utilizing modeling languages. Subsequently, a detailed description of the geometric parameterization concerning important engine components and additional data structures follows. Besides the methodology, the software implementation to support this approach is presented in detail, including data serialization and data identification, as well as automated capturing and storage of provenance data throughout the design process. The functionality of the approach is demonstrated by means of examples derived from the preliminary engine design.

A Generic Parametric Modeling Engine Targeted Towards Multidisciplinary Design: Goals and Concepts

“…We intend to create a grunk plugin based on TiGL, as it allows to combination of the fixed parameter set of the aircraft with custom parameters for further geometry modifications into a common feature tree. Similarly, the software GTlab [21] defines a data model for aircraft engines [20], including their geometry. It is planned to port GTlab's geometric modeling engine from OCCT to grunk to take advantage of new features such as the algorithmic differentiation of geometry generation and the ability to extend fixed engine parameters with user-defined ones.…”