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Original Date: 08/07/1995
Revision Date: 01/18/2007
Information : Conceptual Design Environment
Lockheed Martin Tactical Aircraft Systems (LMTAS) uses an internally-developed Computer-Aided Design (CAD) system called Advanced Computer-Aided Design (ACAD) during conceptual design to provide the best opportunity to reduce total product cost. ACAD provides LMTAS the capability to concurrently evaluate manufacturing, tooling, factory, and enterprise concepts with product concepts, and to rapidly construct conceptual virtual prototypes. These virtual prototypes are used for early cost evaluation. ACAD also has an interactive capability through high-speed data transfer lines with other sites to provide real time, individual interaction with all connected sites.
Development of ACAD was initiated in 1982 and now contains over 800,000 lines of code. The effort was undertaken because there were no commercial tools for LMTAS’ needed capabilities. ACAD’s customized features include:
Rapid lofting of advanced surfaces
Geometric associativity to facilitate rapid iterative design modifications
Rapid area, volume, and center of gravity analysis tools
Aerodynamic center analysis
Advanced meshing interface to Radar Cross Section and Computational Fluid Dynamics
Rapid structural modeling; weight and cost prediction
Carrier suitability analysis tools
Stereolithography interface
Obscuration (vision) plots
Rapid solid modeling
Ray tracing cavity analysis
Built-in animation/simulation tool.
The ability to rapidly generate multiple structural models with associated weight and cost estimates is a major benefit for design optimization in the early stages of product development. Integrated simulation (Figure 2-5) allows many assembly and manufacturing processes to be proofed well in advance of hardware availability, thereby avoiding costly fabrication of mock-ups.
(Figure 2-5) Integrated Simulation
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