Integrated Design Technology

Development of tools and integrated systems for the design and manufacture of flight vehicles.

The objectives of this investment area are to provide enabling technologies to radically reduce aerospace vehicle development time and cost, and to improve the capability or safety of such vehicles. The IT Base will work with the other R&T programs to develop validated interdisciplinary and variable complexity analysis and design systems for aerospace vehicles and propulsion systems, and components to enhance performance, safety, efficiency, and affordability. This will be done by integrating the disparate design technologies through a suite of information system technologies.

Analytical Tools and Environments for Design (ATED) and Integrated Instrumentation and Testing Systems (IITS) are the projects addressing this program investment area.

The top-level objectives of this investment area are:

1. Demonstrate the information technology environments for integrated aerospace vehicle design and a reduction in design cycle time by:
   
   
• Providing on-demand information and knowledge to enable informed design decisions earlier in the design cycle
  
  
• Providing the information technology for multidisciplinary, multifidelity, geographically-distributed aerospace vehicle preliminary design


2. Implement advanced instrumentation and test techniques into an integrated design environment to reduce time and cost of aerospace vehicle design by:
   
   
• Developing and prototyping advanced instrumentation to provide previously unavailable, near real-time experimental measurements
  
  
• Providing information technology for near real-time access to legacy and current databases of experimental measurements

To date, a generic development cycle for typical aerospace vehicles consists of a product definition phase followed by a product development phase. While the expenditure of resources (time and money) in the product definition phase is small compared to the expenditure during product development, the committed downstream costs become large. Therefore, the elimination of downstream "discovery" is a desirable characteristic for the overall process, since this eliminates costly redesign and rework.

Recently there has been an important trend in aerospace systems design. The evolution of information technologies (including distributed object technologies and component architectures, numerical modeling capabilities, computer hardware, software engineering, CAD/CAM systems, and collaborative network technologies) have matured to a point where they have the potential not only to improve, but also to radically redefine the aerospace design, test, and development process. NASA and the aerospace industry are reaching a new balance between the standard tools of wind tunnel and engine testing or "physical prototyping," and computational modeling or "virtual prototyping" during design. The greatly improved fidelity and speed of the virtual prototyping systems have made them a favorite for designers. However, linkages between computational models of various fidelity levels and integration of multidisciplinary computational domain codes (fluids, structural, thermal, etc.) remain the exception rather than the rule. In order to harness the true capabilities of computational modeling, a system must be created to manage and operate the virtual prototyping codes in conjunction with each other and as an integrated component with the physical prototyping.

Many of the technologies for improving the experimental and computational design systems are now mature enough to implement. The Integrated Design Technology investment area is working with new systems and architectures which allow closer integration of the physical and virtual prototyping systems than has even been achieved before. These design cycle improvements will provide substantial contribution to both the Enterprise goals and objectives, and the U.S. aerospace industry.