Emerging from an industrial case study in the aerospace industry, the paper proposes an approach to evaluate sub- system technology concepts from a life cycle perspective. The approach is composed by 5 main phases that aims to drive product designers towards more value-oriented design decisions. It is shown how different life cycle alternatives, such as the selling of a Product-Service-System instead of a traditional product, deeply impact the value of design alternatives. The described approach has been developed in collaboration with industrial partners and represents a potential instrument to enhance value-driven product design.

Designing and implementing a Knowledge Management System (KMS) in a Virtual Enterprise is a labour intensive and risky task. Solution prototypes (Pilots) are usually built to verify system effectiveness prior to final implementation. The paper proposes a methodology to guide this Pilot specifications definition process. These guidelines support engineers and knowledge experts in collaboratively defining functionalities, services, software components and performance indicators of the prototype. The methodology has been conceived and applied within the European project VIVACE, to support the development of a Knowledge Enabled Engineering (KEE) system in the aeronautical domain.

Industry is a main stakeholder when it comes to realising the transition towards a sustainable future. Academia, with its, knowledge and methods, needs to support the industry on this journey. This paper, focuses on the practical learnings on how to implement sustainability research from an industrial perspective. It aims to share some lessons learnt from a longitudinal case study and a development journey in implementing sustainability research in the product innovation process at GKN Aerospace Engine System. The paper gives an overview, based on a literature study, of what is required to successfully implement sustainability in product development. It also provides a summary of the different research projects at the company with learnings from practical and academic perspectives, and the main learnings and changes in relation to different development phases in the sustainability journey. Although, this journey began over ten years ago, and shows the importance of long-term collaboration, it provides key-factors that can be applied also in short term collaborations and for faster implementation of research in general and sustainable product development research in particular.

About 75% of the total product cost is determined in the early design phase, which means that the possibilities to affect costs are relatively small when the design phase is completed. For companies, it is therefore vital to conduct reliable cost estimates in the early design phase, when selecting between different design choices. When conducting a cost estimate there are many uncertainties. The aim with this study is therefore to explore how uncertainties regarding product cost can be considered when estimating product cost and how expert’s knowledge can be integrated within cost estimation. A case study has been conducted within the aerospace industry at the company GKN Aerospace Sweden (GAS) in Trollhättan, from which a model to estimate product cost has been developed. The model is developed for space turbines, but can with modifications be used for other products. Space turbines are highly advanced products, produced in small batches with complex manufacturing processes and high costs. Because of the heavy capital investment, long lead times and high risks, cost estimates become very important, which made GAS suitable for the case study.

The new cost estimation model (NCEM) developed is a combination between intuitive, analogical and analytical cost estimation techniques. Product cost at GAS is built up by the following cost elements; raw material, purchased parts, material surcharge, manufacturing cost, manufacturing surcharge, outsourced operations, method support, delivery cost, warranty and scrap, which are studied more in depth. The material cost is estimated based on historical data and a list of previous purchased alloys is created. The manufacturing cost is determined more in detail where the cost for each operation is estimated, based on operation time, amount of removed material or welding speed. The method support cost is estimated based on a study of an internal prognosis where the amount of time from each discipline needed to support the product is determined. Included in the NCEM is also a risk assessment.

The main insights from this study is that transparency is vital when estimating product cost. It is important to state what assumptions that have been made. Breaking down the product cost into smaller units and create awareness about the cost drivers will identify risks and reduce uncertainness. Experts possess a great deal of knowledge about cost drivers and should be integrated when estimating product cost. 

Additive manufacturing has the potential to decrease the climate impact of aviation by providing more light-weight designs. Sustainability is however required to be assessed from a systemic view, including all lifecycle phases, and from a social, ecologic, and economic dimension. This is however challenging in early phase design, where also a large design space need to be explored. A case study is carried out with an aerospace company where two candidate engineering design tools are combined to address this. The integration of these two engineering tools are applied on a Turbine Rear Structure, and shows promising results in enabling a systemic view of sustainability to be integrated and assessed in early phase design space explorations of additive manufactured components. It is recommended that the integration between the two tools is further established and validated. © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press.

As functional (total care) products emerge in the jet engine industry, the need for product life-cycle models capable of definition and evaluation of life cycle properties increases, since functional products (FP) includes both hardware and service. Recent life-cycle models are intended for hardware products and mostly handle design and manufacturing knowledge. The aim of this article is to present a design approach that extends the evaluation capabilities beyond classical hardware design and manufacturing evaluation. The focus has been to introduce evaluation of manufacturing and post-manufacturing activities in evaluation of conceptual designs. For this purpose, a model has been proposed to handle the information flow between teams when developing structural jet engine components. A case study, in which the proposed model was used in cooperation with a jet engine component manufacturer, is presented. Aspects concerning design, manufacturing, performance, and maintenance of jet engine flanges were included in the example by means of a knowledge based engineering (KBE)-system coupled to databases and spreadsheets. The model is more suitable than recent work for the development of hardware parts of functional products (HFP), since knowledge from more product development disciplines is included. As the engineer changes the design and directly assesses the life-cycle cost (LCC) and how the changes impact the interface to other jet engine components, more knowledge on the impact of design decisions is available at hand for the engineering designer than without the model

Novel jet engine concepts and architectures are being explored to reduce mass, fuel consumption, development cost and environmental impact while increasing performance. Although the engine systems development process of the next generation aero engines takes place at the original equipment manufacturer level, component manufacturers need to optimize their components using an integrated engine system design approach. Therefore, they need the capability to model and simulate whole engine behavior. While modeling and simulation are traditional strengths of the aerospace industry, model integration of the whole engine system and its components, as well as between separate disciplines, is still a relatively weak link. This paper presents a master-model approach that facilitates integrated analysis used in design optimization. The master-model approach promotes the existence of a single governing version of the product definition, including associated versions of loads, materials, interfaces, constraints etc. A simple yet illustrative industry application is presented where dynamics and displacement analysis are performed using the master model and a parameter study is performed to find an optimal design. The presented scenario investigates the impact of changing the bearing position of the turbine rear frame of a turbo-fan engine considering the load case of a “fan blade off” event.

Novel rotating machinery design concepts and architectures are being explored to reduce mass, energy consumption, manufacturing costs, and environmental impact while increasing performance. As component manufacturers supply parts to original equipment manufacturers, it is desirable to design the components using a systems approach so that they are optimized for system-level performance. To accomplish that, suppliers must be able to model and predict the behavior of the whole machinery. Traditional computer-aided design/computer-aided engineering master-modeling approaches enable manual changes to be propagated to linked models. Novel knowledge-based master-modeling approaches enable automated coordination of multidisciplinary analyses. In this article, we present a specific implementation of such a knowledge-based master-modeling approach that facilitates multidisciplinary design optimization of rotating machinery. The master-model (MM) approach promotes the existence of a single governing version of the product definition as well as operating scenarios. Rules, scripts, and macros link the MM to domain-specific models. A simple yet illustrative industry application is presented, where rotor-dynamics and displacement analyses are performed to evaluate relocation alternatives for the rear bearing position of a rotating machinery under a ‘fan-blade-off’ load case.

Aviation strives today to include environmental and social considerations as drivers for decision making in design. This paper proposes a serious game to raise awareness of the value and cost implications of being ‘sustainability compliant’ when developing aerospace sub-systems and components. After describing the development of the game, from needfinding to prototyping and testing, the paper discusses the results from verification activities with practitioners, revealing the ability of the game to raise sustainability awareness and support negotiation across disciplinary boundaries in design

Sustainability considerations are traditionally difficult to trade-off with technical and business requirements in an early design phase. Hence, design teams need support to reflect early on in the process, on how sustainability may affect profitability and customer value fulfilment in the long term. The commoditisation of modelling and simulation techniques points to gamification and serious gaming as emerging approaches to raise awareness among the design team – as well as users and stakeholders – of the expected behaviour of a solution along its life cycle. The objective of this paper is to explore how serious games can be used to inform decision-makers about the value versus cost implications of being (or not being) ‘sustainability compliant’ when designing products and systems. The paper initially presents the findings from a descriptive study focused on the definition of ‘design support’ intended to raise sustainability awareness through serious gaming. It further describes the development, application and testing of one of such games for material selection in the aerospace industry. 

Compliant foil gas seal is one of the advanced cylindrical gas seal technologies and can be commonly used in the secondary flow system of an aero-engine. It can enhance the dynamic stability of the aero-engine by meeting the steady requirements of the aero-engine seal system. To evaluate the performance of compliant foil gas seal, the steady performance of the gas seal is firstly analyzed to predict the sealing efficiency and obtain the pressure distribution of the gas seal in the compressible flow field. Then, the effects of the operating parameters on the rotordynamic coefficients are analyzed using the finite differential method. It can be used to predict the operation performance of the aero-engine and prepare for the optimization and test rig of compliant foil gas seal on the T-shaped groove. © 2020 by the authors.