Designing tomorrow's aircraft structures

Airframe manufacturers are continuously creating innovative designs, making greater use of new lightweight materials and increasing their focus on passenger comfort. Achieving a perfect balance between these competing requirements represents a tremendous challenge for the design and engineering of the airframe.

Structural analysis

Preparation of component or full aircraft models and analysis of their performance in terms of structural integrity is key to fast simulation of new designs. LMS Virtual.Lab offers the flexibility to run a full geometry-based analysis process, to follow a mesh-based approach or a combination of both. All three approaches benefit from the full associativity throughout the simulation process. The integration of various process steps and simulation tools eliminates the need to rework models, duplicate meshes, transfer files, translate data and visualize results in application-specific formats. In recent customer deployments, LMS Virtual.Lab has delivered substantial productivity gains for component analysis: a 30% plus time saving for initial stress analysis and a more than 70%

gain for iterative analysis.

Structural dynamics

As commercial transport aircraft designs become larger and more flexible, the impact of vibrations on a vehicle’s

flight dynamics, flight control and flying qualities becomes increasingly important. Today’s designs undergo sophisticated aeroelastic analyses to ensure that the design is free of flutter within the flight envelope. These analytical results are verified by wind-tunnel flutter models and ground vibration tests. LMS offers an integrated solution based on LMS Test.Lab and LMS Virtual.Lab to handle the test preparation, modal testing, modal analysis, numerical model correlation, model updating and model exploitation. Dynamics specialists recognize this

integrated approach as a key enabling factor in getting new aircraft faster to market.

Operational modal analysis

Environmental effects and diverse loading conditions significantly impact the behavior of structures during

operational conditions. The inability to measure input forces, the influence of temperature/mass changes and the

introduction of non-linearities generally deliver data sets that are difficult to analyze and set additional challenges to the identification of structural characteristics. LMS Test.Lab offers the latest technological developments in the field of modal parameter estimations allowing structural identification based on operational data only.

Noise, vibration & comfort analysis

Accurate prediction of the acoustics of an aircraft interior requires accurate modeling of the different noise transmission paths, both structureborne and airborne. The random-acoustics technologies that LMS Virtual.Lab offers make it possible to calculate the structural behavior of the fuselage due to a random pressure field acting on its surface. LMS Virtual. Lab combines multi-layer trim transmission with an interior acoustic model to accurately predict the interior noise levels of the aircraft. The specific aero-acoustics capabilities tackle noise generated from landing gear and flaps in the airflow.