Automated and interactive evaluation of welding producibility in an multidisciplinary design optimization environment for aircraft components
Journal article, 2021

The automation capabilities and virtual tools within engineering disciplines, such as structural mechanics and aerodynamics, enable efficient Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) approaches to evaluate and optimize the performance of a large number of design variants during early design stages of aircraft components. However, for components that are designed to be welded, in which multiple functional requirements are satisfied by one single welded structure, the automation and simulation capabilities to evaluate welding-producibility and predict welding quality (geometrical deformation, weld bead geometrical quality, cracks, pores, etc) are limited. Besides the complexity of simulating all phenomena within the welding process, one of the main problems in welded integrated components is the existing coupling between welding quality metrics and product geometry. Welding quality can vary for every new product geometrical variant. Thus, there is a need of analyzing rapidly and virtually the interaction and sensitivity coefficients between design parameters and welding quality to predict welding producibility. This paper presents as a result an automated and interactive welding-producibility evaluation approach. This approach incorporates a data-based of welding-producibility criteria, as well as welding simulation and metamodel methods, which enable an interactive and automated evaluation of welding quality of a large number of product variants. The approach has been tested in an industrial use-case involving a multidisciplinary design process of aircraft components. The results from analyzing the welding-producibility of a set of design variants have been plotted together with the analysis results from other engineering disciplines resulting in an interactive tool built with parallel coordinate graphs. The approach proposed allows the generation and reuse of welding producibility information to perform analyses within a big spectrum of the design space in a rapid and interactive fashion, thus supporting designers on dealing with changes and taking fact-based decisions during the multidisciplinary design process.

Design for welding

Automated multidisciplinary design optimization

Metamodel

Welding producibility

Welding simulation

Aerospace

Author

Julia Madrid

Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science, Product Development

Petter Andersson

GKN Aerospace Services

Rikard Söderberg

Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science

Kristina Wärmefjord

Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science, Product Development

Donatas Kveselys

GKN Aerospace Services

Lars Lindkvist

Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science, Product Development

Johan Lööf

GKN Aerospace Services

International Journal on Interactive Design and Manufacturing

1955-2513 (ISSN) 19552505 (eISSN)

Vol. 15 4 463-479

Subject Categories

Production Engineering, Human Work Science and Ergonomics

Aerospace Engineering

Manufacturing, Surface and Joining Technology

DOI

10.1007/s12008-021-00775-z

More information

Latest update

4/5/2022 5