Enabling fuel system component placement on the basis of geometric and certification requirements within a semantic knowledge-based engineering framework

The aerospace industry is in a constant state of evolution, encountering fresh challenges amid technological advancements and shifting economic landscapes. To maintain a competitive edge, aerospace companies must continually foster innovation and adaptability. In response to a more competitive market and heightened customer expectations, the aerospace sector is directing its investments toward pioneering technologies capable of curbing project development costs. The early phases of aircraft development hold paramount significance, exerting great influence on overall project outcomes, and thus stand to gain immensely from novel processes and design methodologies. The accurate and comprehensive definition of aircraft geometry constitutes a critical requirement for a multitude of analyses, profoundly impacting the final aircraft design. Unfortunately, these detailed descriptions are often elusive during the initial project stages. Among the array of methodologies available, Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE) emerges as an interesting approach for streamlining product development timelines and cost structures by capitalizing on pre-existing knowledge drawn from analogous projects. Harnessing DLR's innovative KBE framework, known as Codex, a set of geometric verification rules have been crafted to bolster early-stage fuel system design. Codex, facilitated by semantic-web technologies, empowers the development of domain-specific languages and tools and seamlessly integrates them into the framework. In conjunction with a suite of geometry creation rules aimed at enriching the geometric information accessible to designers during the initial phases, the GeoVerification tool equips engineers with valuable data concerning the correctness of the system's architectural geometry. Furthermore, a series of airworthiness requirements and guidelines have been implemented, demonstrating the potential for automating the usage of this knowledge. An important feature, seamlessly integrated into the tool, resides in its capacity to evaluate diverse scenarios of uncontained engine burst failures (UERFs) and provide remedial design actions. Efforts have culminated in the development and integration of 25 verification rules and 10 geometry verification rules within the GeoVerification Tool. To illustrate the tool's capabilities, a fuel system architecture for DLR's twin-engine D-150 aircraft was designed. Leveraging existing geometric data pertaining to the aircraft's structure, highly detailed geometric characterizations of the fuel tanks were achieved. Moreover, spar-mounted and bottom-mounted fuel boost pumps, supply lines, fuel valves, and a simplified crossfeed subsystem were designed. Over 500 requirements' checks were executed in under four minutes using a standard personal computer for the fuel system architecture. By embracing a parametric design approach and leveraging the developed geometry creation rules, including supporting rules aimed at supporting component placement automation, geometric incompatibilities were minimized. Furthermore, the tool's results, stored within the knowledge graph, facilitate the efficient management of design anomalies and the provision of corrective actions. A total of four iterations were undertaken to refine the modeled architecture, ultimately yielding a geometrically and certification compatible fuel system design.