In the highly competitive aerospace industry, engine manufacturers must react very quickly and precisely to any demand emerging from aircraft manufacturers if they want to be positioned on the offer. This is especially true when answering to Requests For Information (RFI) based on preliminary design investigations of first level.
In order to reduce the time needed to perform these costly operations while improving the performances achieved, Snecma wishes to develop tools for dimensioning the engine and also for assessing key parameters such as mass, emissions, fuel burn, costs, etc. Unfortunately, the set of tools and the process used at the present time for preliminary design investigations of first level are not sufficient to meet the high standards sought-after by the company in terms of time and performances. As a consequence, efforts must be spent on redefining the whole process and the tools it is based on; here is the mission that has been conferred upon me.
Multiple exchanges with performances engineers and specialists allowed to draw the current process for preliminary design investigations of first level and raise all the associated concerns. At the same time, a status of the existing tools (called modules in this report), mainly developed under Excel, has been realised in order to identify the range of action for today’s investigations.
A prototype has been developed under SDK Python with the aim of proving the feasibility of a solution to a difficulty that shows up in the process for each new investigation: the one of generating the workflow on the optimisation software Optimus. A target process has finally been discussed considering all the information collected, and would allow dividing by five the time needed to perform investigations compare to now. The prototype developed lead to interesting results and this solution could thus probably be integrated in the target process as it would allow saving one day of work for an engineer for each study to be carried out.
Solutions have been proposed to all the concerns identified in the process and they will have to be discussed with many actors and investigated further in the near future in order to set the target process that will allow meeting the final objective of answering all types of RFIs emitted by aircraft manufacturer in a very short time with a high level of confidence in the results.
Source: KTH
Author: Benethuillere, Quentin