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April 05, 2021

All industries have been faced with the major challenges of designing better quality products in less time and that too at a lower design and production cost. Industrial competitiveness is under huge pressure to ensure safety and positive environmental impacts of its products - in terms of sustainability. This is due to the globalization of the market, increasing consumer awareness, and the introduction of stricter regulations by regulating authorities.

In recent years, major innovations in product manufacturing and design have addressed product design issues. In this case, aerospace service providing companies are launching new technology variants to get the upper hand in the market. One such example is the use of Virtual Prototyping to test fit various parts of the aircraft together and other manufacturing processes, like aircraft engine mount repair.

In this blog, we will discuss how virtual prototyping is benefitting the aerospace industry and its design processes. But before diving into these details, let us see what exactly is Virtual Prototyping.

What Is Virtual Prototyping?

Virtual prototyping, also known as VP, is a software-based engineering discipline which involves modeling a system, simulating and visualizing its behavior under real-world operating conditions, and refining its design through a repetitious process. It is used as a substitute for traditional prototyping because it does not require you to produce a physical object for performance testing and design evaluation - all these processes are carried out by computers.

Virtual Prototyping In The Aerospace Industry

The key goals of the aerospace sector are to design and build their products anywhere you want, in minimum time, and at a lower cost. This is why virtual prototyping is winning the race. It allows the design team to build virtual prototypes of any aircraft part and perform various test simulations visually and mathematically on the computer. It is considered the centerpiece of the process for the aerospace industry.

Advantages Of Virtual Prototyping

It is important for you to know the capabilities and advantages of VP technology to understand its full potential and the various opportunities it may provide in the future to the aerospace industry. The advantages are illustrated in the paragraphs below, which will give you an idea of how virtual prototyping has replaced the decades-old practice of traditional prototyping.

The traditional prototyping process used MS Office, more specifically excel spreadsheets, to carry out simple to complex calculations that were more favorable to the finance team than the design team. The old models were restrictive in their functionality for two reasons: one their time-consuming nature, and second their high error rate.

In addition to this, the procedure involves building physical objects to test on before moving on to the manufacturing phase, whereas in VP, everything is done virtually on computer software. This technology is less time-consuming and saves you the cost of buying and building from scraps, only to destroy them in the case of major issues with the product's development.

Another disadvantage of the old-school prototyping software is that it was unviewable when it comes to many functional aspects of the aircraft part and process involved; for instance, no fluid flow analysis can be done for the wing or any other part of the aircraft. However, with virtual prototypes, CFD or computational fluid flow dynamic analysis can be applied to almost all the critical systems and components of the aircraft.

The VP approach works by first coming up with a design for a part or a system, creating a simulation for it, running tests, rearranging or making adjustments, if needed, and then building the final product - ensuring better quality and higher efficiency at a cheap cost. On the other hand, the traditional physical prototypes are first designed, created, and undergo adjustment if testing results in errors, again redesigned and retested, and then are approved to be built again, thus wasting a lot of time and resources.

In the aircraft welding industry, virtual prototyping has proved to be cost-effective and time-efficient. Therefore, it is employed in various processes such as testing to check if all critical components and systems fit together without expensive tooling. These include tests of aircraft engine mounts, fuel tank design analysis, aircraft exhaust components, and verification of various manufacturing processes.

About Acorn Welding

Acorn Welding is the most trusted and highly qualified aviation welding company in Edmonton. We have the latest product designs and manufacturing capabilities required for safe aircraft welding. To find out more about our product design services, click here.