Aircraft design – Part 2: Leveraging a multidisciplinary digital twin
In part one of our blog series on a multidisciplinary approach to aircraft design, we discussed the importance of establishing a single source of truth to connect traditionally siloed design teams. Today we’ll focus on the second of the three pillars of this approach: Leveraging a comprehensive, multidisciplinary digital twin.
Why is a digital twin important in aircraft design?
A digital twin brings together all aspects of product development to create a digital representation of a physical product. This is important to avoid miscommunication and errors during the aircraft design process. Miscommunication and errors are even more costly down the line, resulting in:
- Late-stage changes on the factory floor
- Design rework
- Costly delays
- A lack of innovation in designs
A digital twin helps manage iterative and evolving designs, bringing together mechanical and software design tools along with electronic and electrical design solutions. The resulting multidisciplinary digital twin helps prevent a misconceived or suboptimal aircraft design.
This integration of all aspects of design through a configuration-driven, multidisciplinary digital twin ensures coherence across domains. Engineers can iterate and evolve designs to drive innovation and optimization. At the same time, they can explore designs more thoroughly across domains with a better context of the surrounding subsystems and components.
Siemens aircraft design software
The Siemens Xcelerator software portfolio has solutions to help aerospace and defense companies leverage multidisciplinary digital twins. Deliver designs faster and improve design manufacturability by:
- Developing product configurations and managing variants
- Incorporating new materials and modeling capabilities, such as generative and electro-mechanical design
- Defining and optimizing electrical systems and harness designs
- Developing multi-board Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) through ECAD/MCAD co-design
- Integrating software design to drive early verification
Check out our solutions for software engineering, mechanical product design, E/E systems development and electronic systems design to learn more about the integrated design tools that can help build a multidisciplinary digital twin.
Missed part one of our aircraft design series? Read it now.
