Professional Engineering was at the TCT Show in September to hear a keynote address from Dr Karsten Heuser, vice-president of AM at Siemens, on how the company, with Stratasys, is helping "transform production of high-performance, hybrid composite structures".
"I want to focus on one part," said Heuser, "which is the radome of this aircraft. If you look a little bit more into it, this is quite a crucial part of the aircraft. Today, we have more and more frequency requirements because of all the antennas and the radiation going through the radome. It needs to fulfil any requirement on aerodynamics, and on the other side it needs to be very, very stable if any kind of impact comes from the front into the aircraft.
"So, how to reimagine this kind of system by AM, to bring an added value for the aerospace industry?
"The first thing is, you should start with designing a digital twin of this product by all these kinds of solutions you can apply today with intelligent software solutions. Therefore, you just start with your CAD design of the whole aircraft. You pick out the radome in the virtual world... you put it into your additive modules in our NX software.
"With this software, you have specific tools and methodologies… to redesign this product so you can do such a kind of honeycomb structure on to it. We have a specific design checker in the software, which helps you to really elaborate if this is printable or not in the end. And before printing and trialling it out, you put it back in the virtual world, you test it in your aircraft still in the virtual world.
"What is the next step? You need to know is it now better, is the stiffness good, what happens on any impact? Still in the virtual world… in the same end-to-end chain from Siemens and Stratasys, you can now choose your material properties you have adopted, coming from different libraries, and now you start to add some damage on to it. So you throw virtual balls in, which happens if you have some birds or whatever flying, and then you analyse what would happen – do you need to improve your stiffness, do you need to improve the behaviour of this part further, or is it already good enough?
"If you need to change it, you just go back into your CAD system and, since it’s integrated, end-to-end connected, this is changed on a mouse click.
"Then you put it back and you can consider how you might change other parts of the aircraft as well. While looking into it you can take some metal parts, you can take some plastic parts out and you just start to do the generative design to really morph it into a more stiff but lower weight structure. So you can pick and place different parts of the aircraft design and redesign it as a virtual twin of the product.
"Once you have done this, you shouldn’t just go to the [real-world 3D-printing] machine and have five to 10 trials… you could stay in the production planning in the virtual world.
"We have specific tools developed here which can simulate the full production process. So you’re still in the virtual world, you import your design and the NX version into the virtual machine, you start the process with the full G code that will end up in the [3D-printing] machine, and the cool stuff is now you learn exactly how your process works. You learn the time, you learn any problems you may have, you optimise your process – maybe before you start the first print.
"This is very important later on because you may not need 10 or 100, or 1,000, parts each time, because you may end up in a [no] spare part business where you just want to print on demand, right the first time. Therefore you should do it in a virtual world…
"After you have validated all the processes, now the fun part starts with ‘right first time’ printing… you see the same as what you have seen in the digital world, as a production process in the real world."
This abridged transcription has been lightly edited by Professional Engineering.
Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.