Efficient methods to build structural performance envelopes in characteristic load space

Abstract

Performance envelopes provide a novel methodology that quantifies the load bearing capacity of a structure in a reduced dimension load space. The envelopes relate the complex loads acting on a structure to the corresponding structural failure constraints and may find many applications within the aircraft structural design process. Constructing envelopes for industrial problems is of particular interest, where the state-of-the-art implementation involves a point cloud meshing and surface modelling strategy. A main challenge in implementing envelopes within an engineering process is the large associated computational costs of construction. The contribution of this article is a robust and efficient strategy to reduce the computational costs of building a performance envelope. The paper presents a method to build the envelopes using a ray-scaling approach. The novel approach is validated by building 3-dimensional envelopes for a representative industrial problem (stiffened panels of AIRBUS’s XRF-1 wing). The results demonstrate a ∼ 42 % reduction in the computation costs compared to the preceding research. The improved construction efficiency makes the employment of envelopes more feasible for large industrial scale processes or when individual failure assessments are computationally expensive.