MSC Software drives innovation in aerospace industry
MSC Software, Californiabased simulation solutions provider since its inception with NASA, has strengthened its foothold in the aerospace sector. It has been adding high-end products to its kitty through strategic acquisitions and in-house product development. MSC pioneered many of the CAE technologies, that are now relied upon by industry to analyse and predict stress, vibration and dynamics, acoustics, and thermal analysis, in their flagship product MSC Nastran.
These technologies help the aerospace component manufacturers and OEMs to design, test and build their engineering products of the highest technical complexity and safety and performance requirements on time and on budget. The company is a part of Hexagon, a leading global provider of information technologies that drive productivity and quality across geospatial and industrial enterprise applications.
MSC has been developing new improved capabilities in existing tools and integrated next generation products and platforms for the aerospace industry. This increases the aerospace component manufacturers’ reliability and accuracy on virtual prototyping by including multi physics and multi discipline interactions.
The company’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approved solutions for aircraft certification like Nastran and Marc are used in every aircraft. Design optimisation is pivotal in every industry and this contributes to lightweight of the components. Aerospace industry banks on reducing the weight perpetually and the 54-year old company provides collaborative Multi-Disciplinary Optimisation (MDO) techniques for the conceptual designs of the manufacturers.
“The Multi Disciplinary Optimisation technique can be applied to all the components and even aircraft as a whole but the effect of fatigue has to be prioritised. The life of the component should not go for a toss owing to MDO techniques. The MDO tool developed by us to optimise complex products also helps the manufacturers in cutting costs and to reduce product development time. We are very strong in this and various customers worldwide are taking advantage of this. This technology has proven to be a promising technique to efficiently manage complex designs with many interacting disciplines.” Sridhar Dharmarajan, Senior Director, MSC Software India, ASEAN & ANZ, told Auto
ComponentsIndia. MSC Software takes care of the material – metals or composites - complexity also.
In order to come up with the ideal solution multiple iterations are required. There will be umpteen ‘what-if’ scenarios and thousands of load cases with various flying trials. Model-based system helps in detailed understanding of the dependencies and interfaces between standards-based models, products, product lines and the systems. The model-based systems help in achieving the results early, in concurrent exploration of various options, improved cross-discipline collaboration, efficient re-use of high rates and improving in time-tomarket. If this system is successfully implemented, there are very few chances for errors and quality issues.
Facing challenges
The demand for air transportation is continually growing and if this demand is to be met with more aircraft flying, the major challenges seen in the environment such as noise, pollution, climate change, risk, resource use have to be kept in mind as priority issues. Noise
has historically been the principal environmental issue for aviation. Noise disturbance is a difficult issue to evaluate as it is open to subjective reactions. Its impact is not a lasting one on the actual environment, but it can have significant adverse effects on people living close to an airport, including: interference with communication, sleep disturbance, annoyance responses, learning acquisition, performance effects and cardiovascular and psychophysiological effects.
All commercial aircraft must meet the International Civil Aviation Organization’s (ICAO’s) noise certification standards. These apply to aircraft designs and types when they are first approved for operational use, and they have been progressively tightened since 1971 where the initial standard was adopted. For instance, airbus is working hard now to reduce the aircraft noise by improving the nacelle acoustic liners which is used to minimise the fan noise radiated from the engine. “With our solution called Actran (change design, material) a simulation based process, the OEM has dramatically reduced the time required to design and evaluate optimised acoustic liners,” Dharmarajan said.
With the help of Actran, Airbus is able to reduce product development costs by avoiding expensive post-design changes, reduce test analysis and iterations, and to improve performance predictions. Noise radiation by vibrating structures is an important factor of consideration in design of products like gearbox, engines, and electronic devices. “Our simulation helps users better understand the noise radiation into the environment, so that their acoustic performance can be improved and noise pollution can be reduced, along with improving the product life,” he said.
Design and simulation is one of the front running technologies in the smart system and the company is very strong in this technology by serving 90% of the global OEMs and suppliers in the aerospace. Increase in demand for precision, low mass, energy efficiency and utmost reliability is making aerospace industry to look for high technology developments through smart systems. Simulation in manufacturing promises to carry out local optimization underpinned by local knowledge bases, ranging from the examination of raw materials and parts and predicting subsequent machine settings to compensate for variation, all the way through to optimising manufacturing parameters based upon endproduct performance.
Evolving Technologies
Some of the evolving technologies in the aerospace industry are usage of new materials and manufacturing processes, additive manufacturing techniques, composites, integrated design platform (MSC Apex, SimManager) etc. “We would like to collaborate and provide solutions to Indian Aero and Defence OEMs and suppliers through the Make in India initiative. Also we want to leverage our expertise in global aero OEMs and suppliers,” Dharmarajan said.
In India, MSC works closely with DRDO, PSUs and other industry partners-guiding them right from feasibility studies to the certification stage. Some of the projects such as LCA, AMCA and UAV’s use simulations, which are of prime importance for any aircraft development. Some of the services the company provides include: Ground Vibration Testing (GVT), internal and external loads calculations, bird strike and ingestion, assembly and part stress, vehicle ditching (water, ground), aeroelastic static, gust and flutter simulation, large scale vehicle assembly modeling, rotor dynamics, kinematic simulation of landing gear and wing flaps, aircraft tie-down load analysis, random vibration within space vehicles, orbital heating, tacked vehicle simulation, composites modeling and failure analysis and materials management.
MSC Software views MSC Apex as a cornerstone, and all other disciplines will be integrated onto this singular platform in the future. The company has also joined the additive manufacturing bandwagon and there are some promising solutions to look forward to like Simufact (for Metals) which predict parameters in welding and forging and reduce the number of iterations and the manufacturing is facilitated without deviations in the first-go itself. Similarly Digimat (for Plastics) and additive manufacturing simulation tools save a lot of money in the manufacturing process.
The global aerospace and defence industry is likely to experience stronger growth in 2017. India’s civil aviation industry also is on a high-growth trajectory. The country aims to become the third-largest aviation market by 2020 and the largest by 2030. The company’s 40% of turnover comes from the aerospace industry, 40% from the automotive industry and 20% from other industries. The expected growth year on year is 25% from India and there are green shoots in the Indian market with respect to aerospace industry, Dharmarajan said.