Phoenix Software Speeds Rapid Conceptual Design Process
Customer Profile: Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company
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In 2001, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated the Quiet Supersonic Platform (QSP) program to identify the technologies needed to drastically reduce the sonic boom generated by a supersonic aircraft. The QSP program objective is to design a long-range, advanced, supersonic aircraft with substantially reduced sonic boom, reduced takeoff and landing noise and increased efficiency relative to current supersonic technology.
Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company leveraged the power of Phoenix software to significantly reduce design process time in order to fully examine model concepts. As a result, Lockheed
Martin advanced from the first stage of a multi-million dollar bid process and was selected as one of the Phase II QSP developers challenged to meet DARPA's goals.
Situation
The QSP program is seeking improved supersonic aviation capabilities such as increased range for refueling, increased area coverage and lower overall operational cost. Most importantly, the technology would produce shock waves approximately seven times less than that of the Concorde, thereby making supersonic flight over land without adverse sonic boom consequences feasible.
Lockheed Martin is competing with other aerospace engineering companies to develop a solution that best meets DARPA's requirements. Lockheed Martin’s QSP development process requires working with disparate analysis applications such as aerodynamics, structural models, cost models and CAD programs.
Software Glue for the Design Process
Lockheed Martin’s rapid conceptual design method using Phoenix software was applied in the QSP design process. Using ModelCenter®, Lockheed Martin engineers are able to rapidly create custom design processes linking dozens of specialized engineering applications running across the company’s global enterprise.
This integrated design and trade study environment enables new alternatives to be analyzed and iterated in a matter of days, compared to the weeks it took using conventional methods. In addition, an engineer analyzing an aircraft concept can integrate an aerodynamics code in Fort Worth, TX, with a teammate’s weights or trajectory code developed in Palmdale, CA. The result was a design environment that put all of the important variables at the fingertips of the most intuitive designers throughout Lockheed Martin.
Result: More Engineering, Less Setup Time
The typical process of spending all week to get one design is gone. Now, engineers can run hundreds of trade studies and concept evaluations in the same amount of time required previously for one design. More engineering gets done now and less time is spent setting up software inputs and reading outputs.
More than 25 different software programs were linked in one ModelCenter Model to help Lockheed Martin share more than 20,000 design parameters. In the end, it was able to reduce a design cycle from 2 weeks down to just 48 hours.
"Using ModelCenter, our design organization can rapidly conduct concept evaluations and more completely canvas the design trade space with a limited amount of time and resources," stated Atherton Carty of Lockheed Martin. "This allows us to devote significantly more time to design innovation and exploration because less time is wasted on non-value added processes."
The ModelCenter solution is a success for the Lockheed Martin design team, and a valued step on the path to designing a far superior supersonic aircraft.
