About one quarter of all space-borne sensors being developed for NASA, DoD and Intelligence applications are overrunning their budget and schedule allocations by factors of 2X or more. A substantial improvement in the cycle time of development for these systems is needed while retaining adequate system performance levels with high reliability. Collaborative engineering practices based on a new CAD/CAE workspace, powered by abstract modeling technology, have resulted in significant reductions in model development time, change management, project cost and delivery time.
For the past two years, an Aerospace Corporation team, led by Senior Project Engineer Mr. David Thomas and supported by a Comet Solutions team led by Mr. Malcolm Panthaki has developed a new process which has significantly improved the cycle time of their STOP (Structural, Thermal and Optical Performance) analysis for a flight hardware program without sacrificing reliability or adequate sensor performance levels.
This presentation describes how the team of CAD, optical, mechanical, structural, and thermal engineers from Aerospace utilized an integrated performance engineering workspace powered by abstract modeling to support a concurrent engineering process for the design of space optical systems. This workspace allowed them to fully leverage their current off-the-shelf CAD and CAE tools for evaluating product performance. The team utilized this unified workspace and project-centric data model to augment and accelerate the evaluation of thermally-induced structural deformations on the optical performance of a flight sensor. By providing easy access to key model and performance data, the workspace enabled design reviews with customers to be conducted effectively, without the need to generate redundant presentation materials.
The authors will present results of the use of this approach on a current flight hardware program, with an emphasis on the significant productivity improvements that were realized. Comparisons of design simulation results to empirical thermal vacuum test results, made directly within the workspace, will also be discussed.
