Nowadays, digitalisation of aircraft, of their operations and their support became a crucial component for all the market players of the aeronautical industry. This technical field occupies an increasingly significant place, due to the generation of a substantial volume and an extensive variety of operational data. This new trend suggests taking those data into account during preliminary design and certification steps, in order to include additional considerations during those phases, such as operational criteria, maintenance, added value, development times or certification delays. In that way, this paper aims at suggesting a methodology to consolidate the aircraft design and certification processes though the use of those novel “digital” resources.
Current developments in preliminary design emphasise the potential benefit of addressing detailed sizing cases in the early design stages. This implies a sound understanding of the loads that the structure must withstand and for which it must demonstrate compliance. In aircraft structural practices, stringent safety requirements demand robust designs. It is understood that the foremost limitation and very challenging aspect, in the aviation sector, consists in complying with those requirements while targeting a contained mass. In this respect, the presented work aims to propose an automated implementation of the dimensioning chain by foregrounding a specific subsystem application, id est the Vertical Tail Plane. The conditions corresponding to a set of critical flight loads are identified and used for the sizing process. The use case intends to standardise the process, narrowing down the large number of unknowns on the overall loosely defined design method.
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