Disposal Analysis Procedure Handbook and Analysis Tool Development- Use Case : " Aircraft Wing"

Within the development of new aircraft projects, as well as for In-Service aircraft, a significant area to be further explored and detailed for Airframers Companies is represented by the product Disposal. Every year about 600 aircrafts are decommissioned, following an increasing trend, creating a strategic business opportunity and, at the same time, a potential environmental risk. A well implemented product Disposal plan should allow: •??to identify parts that can be resold as spare or recycled material; •??to identify risks associated with the Disposal activities; •??to define new Disposal requirements to be introduced into the projects; •??to evaluate maintenance tasks, costs, tools and personnel. These allow to obtain an added value from the product, to minimize the environmental impact and to give Companies and Customers a way to economically quantify and optimize the phasing out of their products. To properly develop a Disposal plan, a dedicated Disposal Analysis should be carried out from the very beginning of a new project. Therefore, the main objective of this thesis is to develop an integrated set of instruments, through a two-person team in concurrence with Leonardo Aircraft Division, to carry out a Disposal Analysis in agreement with the International S-Series ILS Specifications. The instruments to be developed are a Disposal Analysis Procedure Handbook and a Disposal Analysis Tool. Both of them have to be tested with a specific selected Use Case. This paper presents the overall methodology and results of the Handbook and Tool development, with a particular focus on the Demilitarization and Dismantling analysis phases. A multi-role transport Aircraft Wing has been chosen as Use Case.?? After a brief introduction to the S-Series Specifications, the paper reports a description of the Handbook, which is structured in agreement with the S3000L Disposal Analysis steps. A series of new developed logical-decisional processes allow to carry out the analysis in a standardized way. Along with the analysis, also a set of new Disposal Cost Evaluation processes has been elaborated, to assess the impacts of the Disposal on both Companies and Customers. The Disposal Costs will be one of the main drivers in future trade-offs used to identify the best Disposal cost-effective strategy. After the Handbook description, the paper reports an overview of the Disposal Analysis Tool, developed in Microsoft Access. Its purpose is to implement in an automated way the logical-decisional processes of the Handbook, allowing the users to carry out the analysis in predefined forms with standardized input tables and reports, to be used during the project phases or towards Suppliers and Customers. In fact, main outputs of the analysis are a series of Recommended Design Objectives, towards the System Engineering, and a Product Disposal File (PDF), which resumes all the results. The information contained in the PDF can be reported in a dedicated Disposal Manual, to be provided to the Customers. Finally, in the last chapter of the paper the Aircraft Wing Use Case is presented, with the purpose of testing the functionalities of the Tool and the validity of the processes developed in the Handbook.