Tag: 2015 AIAA Propulsion and Energy Forum

Computational Fluid Dynamic Researchers and Experimental Fluid Dynamics Researchers Must Work Together

Panelists: Moderator James Heidmann, NASA’s Glenn Research Center; Keith Blodgett, GE Aviation; Michael Mastaler, NASA; Richard “Dick” Scharnhost, Boeing Co.; Roy Shultz, Mira Facilities 2 Inc.; Paul Van Slooten, United Technologies Research Center

By Duane Hyland, AIAA Communications (2008-2017)

Government and aerospace industry experts debated the merits of computational fluid dynamics modeling and experimental fluid dynamics modeling during “Integrated Roles of Experimental Fluid Dynamics and Computational Fluid Dynamics,” a panel at the 2015 AIAA Propulsion and Energy Forum in Orlando, Florida. The conclusion: CFD and EFD practitioners must find ways to work together rather than dividing into separate camps.

CFD is the computer-driven analysis of flows in and around structures, and EFD is the use of a wind tunnel to do the same analysis.

Panel moderator James Heidman, an aerospace engineer with NASA’s Glenn Research Center, told the audience that, in his opinion, “there is a strong need for a collaborative effort for CFD and EFD going forward; they both have a lot in common, and the communities should communicate better.”

Paul Van Slooten of the United Technologies Research Center said that in 1975 it was believed that CFD would replace wind tunnel testing within two decades. He then pointed out that the declared death of wind tunnel technology was premature, with NASA, NASCAR and Mercedes-Benz just some of the companies who have built wind tunnel facilities in recent years. Every panelist agreed that although CFD use is expanding throughout testing circles, there are still some things that it can’t do well, so researchers must still use EFD methods.

Among the things that CFD can’t do well, but EFD can, according to all the panelists, are accurately predicting separated flows; modeling compressor stalls; modeling transonic separation; and modeling high angles of attack. The panelists said that traditional EFD testing in wind tunnels is still the best way to obtain data in those instances.

The best paradigm, Van Slooten explained is for CFD and EFD to work “side-by-side, complementing each other.”

Another problem with relying exclusively on CFD can be the “garbage-in, garbage-out” problem, as several panelists pointed out. If the operators don’t know how to work the data sets properly, you could end up in a situation where you have a lot of data but nothing that really matters, or even worse, just bad data.

In the end, both sides of CFD and EFD methods must talk to one another and work side-by-side.

As Roy Shultz of Mira Facilities 2 Inc. explained: “It’s relevant and important, and the people who need big data should be very interested in talking to the people who produce big data so we understand what the big data we are getting is.”

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In-space Propulsion Investments are all About the Return on Investment

Panelists: Moderator Mitchell Walker, Georgia Institute of Technology; Jonny Dyer, Skybox Imaging; Mark Lewis, Science and Technology Policy Institute, Institute of Defense Analyses; Peter Lord, Space Systems Loral; Roger Myers, Aerojet Rocketdyne; Jeff Sheehy, NASA

By Duane Hyland, AIAA Communications (2008-2017)

“Competition in the global space-propulsion market continues to increase as industry continues to invest in technology and strategy and as agencies use tech programs to push the boundaries,” said Mitchell Walker, associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, during a full 2015 AIAA Propulsion and Energy Forum 360 Panel titled “Government Investments Enabling Advancement of In-Space Propulsion.”

Mitchell told the crowd that it is very important to “align requirements to support the critical infusion of government funding technology in space propulsion and emerging markets.” Roger Myers, executive director of advanced in-space programs with Aerojet Rocketdyne, explained that although early investments in space-propulsion systems bolstered the national defense and space-exploration programs, the landscape is changing. Myers said that more “public-private partnerships are coming on line.”

Myers also laid out some real barriers to advances in propulsion technology, chief among them being the “need for the investment to exceed the cost plus the risk factor inherent in the technology.” If it can’t do that, he said, the system will most likely be rejected. Myers explained that time-tested technology holds the edge for approvals and that uncertainty about a system trumps all potential benefits when it comes to approval. Myers singled out electric propulsion systems and solar electric power systems as those receiving the majority of investment dollars.

Myers said that other major deterrents to investment are the size of the market and the length of time it takes to bring systems to market — delays that can last a decade. The longer the time, the more likely the investment will fail, he said.

Jonny Dyer, chief engineer with Skybox Imaging, explained that the reliance on known systems stunts growth, quipping, “We are flying 50-year-old technology exclusively, with thrusters going back to Apollo. Imagine if I tried to sell you a 50-year-old telephone. Nobody is going to buy a 50-year-old telephone.”

Not to be outdone, when asked what the greatest barrier to electric propulsion in space was, Mark Lewis, director of the Science and Technology Policy Institute, Institute of Defense Analyses, deadpanned, “The need for a long extension cord.”

All levity aside, in the end, new propulsion systems for satellites — both large and small — will come down to their return on investment. If the return is there, investments will come; if the risk is too great, investors will stay out of the market.

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Future of Propulsion and Power is Lighter, Cooler, Faster and Global

Speaker: Christopher “Chris” Lorence, GE Aviation

By Duane Hyland, AIAA Communications (2008-2017)

Christopher “Chris” Lorence, general manager of engineering technologies with GE Aviation, kicked off the 2015 AIAA Propulsion and Energy Forum in Orlando, Florida, with a talk on the future of propulsion and energy systems. Lorence believes that eventually propulsion and energy systems on aircraft will be largely indistinguishable, bringing “the fields of propulsion and energy creation together.”

Lorence told the near-capacity crowd that “energy is an increasingly important part of what we see happening in propulsion,” explaining that the engine is the hub of everything on an aircraft, “be it a directed energy weapon on a military aircraft or charging an iPhone at your seat,” the energy comes from the engine.

Lorence reviewed several mega trends that are influencing the propulsion and energy industries, including “greater use of digital analytics, advanced composites and moving to all-electric aircraft.” Lorence explained that what drives these trends is a desire to produce engines capable of powering aircraft longer, more cheaply and with greater range than ever before.

Lorence explained that the use of digital analytics allows engineers to extract more data from the engine system, leading to a better understanding of fuel burn and capacity and ultimately allowing for a dramatic shift in thought about in-flight performance. Advanced components, such as ceramic matrix components, allow the construction of lighter, cooler and faster operating systems, lowering fuel burn by 5 percent, Lorence said, while increasing performance speed and range. Evolving to all-electric aircraft, he said, will allow for a greater variety of aircraft body shapes and a lessened impact on the environment and represent a “tremendous opportunity” for future growth in systems development.

Lorence cautioned, however, that when it comes to electric engines, “we aren’t there yet, and we still need to do more to work on fuel burn and improve performance of the engines,” but he was confident that this would happen and we will see an all-electric future.

Other trends Lorence mentioned include additive manufacturing, the development of “extreme machines” and digital technology.

Lorence concluded his talk with some of the things GE is doing to revolutionize engineering, including the formation of lean labs, or small laboratories focusing on one particular problem; renewed university partnerships, which allow students and professors to work on problems facing the aviation community; and crowdsourcing, or setting up engineering problems as competitions to allow thousands of engineers around the world to have a hand in solving them.

Lorence closed by reminding the audience that aviation makes the world smaller and brings the world together and that the future of advances in energy and propulsion systems would make that even easier for the community.

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Kennedy Space Center Evolves to Serve New Generation of Space Explorers

Speaker: Robert Cabana, NASA’s Kennedy Space Center

By Duane Hyland, AIAA Communications (2008-2017)

Long considered the nerve center of the U.S. space program, the site of NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, has witnessed every manned mission the U.S. has started. With the end of the space-shuttle era in 2011, Kennedy faced an uncertain future with many worrying that the best days of the center were behind it.

Not so, according to Robert Cabana, director of the Kennedy Space Center. Cabana told an audience at “The Transformation of the Kennedy Space Center,” a lecture during the 2015 AIAA Propulsion and Energy Forum in Orlando, Florida, that Kennedy is “rapidly evolving to meet the needs of a new generation of space explorers,” who will need a safe place to leave from and return to as they go about their explorations.

Cabana explained that the center is preparing to host the next generation of launchers and vehicles for the U.S. space program, chief among them the Space Launch System (SLS) and the Orion spacecraft. He said the Kennedy also is expanding to meet the needs of commercial space customers. In order to host these new generations of rockets, NASA and its private space company partners are building new buildings, constructing new launch pad complexes and modifying older complexes.

Cabana said the projects include a revamp of the Vehicle Assembly Building; transformation of the Orbiter Processing Facility into a Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility; a rebuild of Firing Room 1 — the room that launched the Apollo missions; and several other changes. Cabana also said that two new launch pad sites were under development: “one north of 39B and one between 39A and 41.”

Another change, according to Cabana, include the Space Exploration Technology Corp.’s redevelopment of iconic launch pad 39A — which launched nearly every Apollo mission — into a facility to launch its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. Additionally, Boeing Co. has taken over part of the Orbiter Processing Facility for its X-37B unmanned spacecraft project. Kennedy also has teamed with the state of Florida and NASA’s Space Life Sciences Laboratory to create Exploration Park, a research and development facility on the center’s property that will serve as a hub for private enterprise and private-public partnerships.

Among the more challenging of the refurbishment projects, Cabana said, has been the removal of the more than 3 miles of 50-year-old copper wiring and other equipment from the firing control rooms tunnel between the rooms and launch complexes.

Cabana explained that the end of the space-shuttle era brought about a 43 percent reduction in the center’s workforce. However, despite the losses, and the end of the iconic program, Cabana said, “Kennedy Space Center is set to become a thriving hub of government space programs, private space programs and private-public partnerships” that will give explorers a safe place to return.

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Global Collaboration for Aerospace Companies is Result of Market, Brings Advantages

Panelists: Moderator James G. Maser, Pratt & Whitney; Jean-Paul Ebanga, CFM International; Leslie J. Kovacs, United Launch Alliance; Richard “Ric” Parker, Rolls-Royce; Marc Vales, Airbus Safran Launchers; Bernard Zimmerman, Pratt & Whitney

By Hannah Godofsky, AIAA Communications

The global collaboration panel at the 2015 AIAA Propulsion and Energy Forum, moderated by James G. Maser, vice president of strategy, marketing and business development with Pratt & Whitney, asked representatives from global aviation and space industry companies to discuss their experiences in international collaborations or joint partnerships.

Marc Vales, head of future programs with Airbus Safran Launchers, said Airbus and Safran collaborated to better align with the newly competitive nature of the commercial space launch industry. It was a response to market demand, he said, elaborating that it is not easy to fund space ventures without international partners.

Vales said budgets are decreasing throughout Europe and that it is not possible for all European countries to maintain their previous levels of support for space ventures. It takes a more efficient venture with a supply chain spread to provide some needed agility, he said.

“Collaboration is essential in the aero engine industry. Perversely, so is competition,” said Richard “Ric” Parker, director of research and technology with Rolls-Royce. He said Rolls-Royce has collaborated with nearly every major manufacturer of aircraft engines to power products as diverse as the Concorde supersonic airliner, military aircraft, small civilian vehicles and helicopters.

“New competitors are just new partners you haven’t yet figured out how to work with,” Parker said.

Parker stressed that Rolls-Royce is able to create an engine without collaboration but that “we must compete as if there is no collaboration and collaborate as if there is no competition.”

Bernard Zimmerman, vice president of group strategy and development with Pratt & Whitney, said his company pursues collaboration to produce the most high-quality engines possible. “Each of the partners develops and manufactures a piece of the engine,” he said. “This gives us what we call ‘best-of-the-best’ technology.”

Zimmerman highlighted other benefits of collaboration, including access to government funding and university partnerships, and stressed that collaboration has led to the safest possible aircraft engines.

“The best part about being partners is that it makes us all better,” he said, explaining that companies can be friends, competitors or suppliers, but ultimately, they’re all colleagues.

Jean-Paul Ebanga, president and CEO of CFM International, talked about the competitive advantage that a close relationship between aerospace and government can represent. He said France and Snecma had a strong alignment, but GE Aviation could not count on the same level of support from the U.S. He characterized the U.S. government’s reaction toward technology sharing as being fearful.

“The French alignment between the government and the private sector was key,” he said. “… having a strong alignment between the government and the private sector can be a decisive factor.”

Leslie Kovacs, director of Washington operations for United Launch Alliance, a joint partnership between Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co., explained that the launch market was not large enough to support the redundant capabilities provided by separate launches from the two partners. The U.S. Air Force asked them to consider merging that part of the space business.

All was going well, Kovacs said, and a stable business that has made nearly a hundred successful launches was created. The Russian invasion of Crimea, however, created a serious disruption to the supply chain that had made ULA so successful. ULA had been using an RD-180 engine designed by Russian engineers, and the cost to build that same engine domestically, as the Pentagon requested, worked out to be $800 million.

“Unforeseen political forces are undermining the greatest launch vehicle in the United States,” Kovacs said, stressing that the fixed size of the national security launch market makes it a difficult business.

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Constraints on Wind Tunnel Testing Frustrate Engineers

Panelists: Doug Garrand, Aerospace Testing Alliance; Michael Mastaler, NASA; Michael Holden, CUBRC; Michael McWithey, Lockheed Martin Corp.; David Schuster, NASA’s Langley Research Center; Roger Simpson, NASA’s Stennis Space Flight Center

By Hannah Godofsky, AIAA Communications

Wind tunnels have been a key part of the testing and validation process in aerospace for a long time. However, the operational capacity of those systems is being threatened by several outside forces. Budget cuts and the use of computer simulations have made the use of wind tunnel facilities to conduct testing seem a luxury to engineers.

“In today’s budgetary climate, large, costly facilities naturally become a prime target for mothballing, closure or divestment to offload the financial burden,” explained David Schuster, a NASA technical fellow with the NASA Engineering and Safety Center at NASA’s Langley Research Center, during the 2015 AIAA Propulsion and Energy Forum panel “Evolution of our National Ground Test Capability,” which discussed the role and capabilities of wind tunnel testing in this new environment.

Doug Garrard of the Aerospace Testing Alliance expressed optimism about the state of wind tunnel testing in the U.S., saying several facilities operated by the military are the best in the world.

Michael McWithey, manager of Wind Tunnel Testing Labs with Lockheed Martin Corp., said many of the facilities in the U.S. are aging as they were built following World War II or during the Cold War to compete with Germany and Russia. He explained that in the absence of a similar threat, many U.S. wind tunnels have been closed or moved offshore as a result of budget constraints.

Computational fluid dynamics modeling of air flows using software programs also has reduced the need for some wind tunnel testing. Michael Mastaler, associate director of the Advanced Air Vehicle Program with NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, emphasized that wind tunnel testing should play a complementary role to the use of computer simulations. He said wind tunnels continue to have some unique capabilities that software programs do not and that it is those unique capabilities that must come into play before the cost can be justified.

“The primary reason we are here and our assets are here is to support the NASA programs,” elaborated Roger Simpson, program manager of the Rocket Propulsion Test Program Office with NASA’s Stennis Space Flight Center.

Michael Holden, vice president of aeronautics with CUBRC, a nonprofit wind tunnel testing facility, spoke about the advances that have been made on the technology side of ground testing. He said the CUBRC facility has some very advanced capabilities, including that missiles can be tested at Mach 20, a level that would duplicate a vehicle’s effects of actually flying the missile.

Component testing can run up to 30,000 feet per second, Holden said. He described some of the chemical and technological constraints on this type of testing, including the introduction of unknown variables at high speeds and the inconsistency of results.

According to the panelists, wind tunnel testing may continue to become rarer, but it will never go away entirely. Though companies and agencies have a responsibility to be prudent and ensure that resources are not being wasted, no software program can fully eliminate the need for lab experiments. Wind tunnels and the skilled employees that operate those facilities are still needed to develop new aerospace vehicles.

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How to Recruit, Retain and Inspire the Next Generation of Aerospace Engineers

Panelists: Moderator Mark Lewis, Science and Technology Policy Institute; Steve Gorrell, Brigham Young University; Mike Hawes, Lockheed Martin Corp.; Carole Hedden, Aviation Week & Space Technology; Yvette Weber, U.S. Air Force/p>

by Ben Iannotta, Editor-in-Chief, Aerospace America

Data shows that the aerospace industry is having trouble keeping young technical talent, and panelists at the 2015 AIAA Propulsion and Energy Forum discussed ways to address that problem.

“It’s a true statement that you are only as good as your people,” said Mark Lewis, director of the Science and Technology Policy Institute, at the start of the “Workforce Development” session.

Carole Hedden, the editorial director at Aviation Week & Space Technology, defined the scope of the problem by listing statistics from the latest Aviation Week workforce study, of which AIAA is a participant. She said that each year, 5.7 percent of the workforce decides to leave aerospace.

“It’s questionable whether that’s actually a healthy rate,” Hedden said.

On top of that, “the vast majority of people choosing to leave are the newbies,” she said, meaning people with less than five years in the industry.

Also, the No. 1 impetus cited for joining the aerospace industry was not an aircraft, satellite or rocket project, but Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors, she added.

One panelist diagnosed that “young people want to be in charge of their destiny,” and she called for a shift in thinking about work-life balance. Today, some employers “subliminally” signal their employees that “time in the office is better and leads to advancement,” said Yvette Weber, the developmental system chief for the U.S. Air Force C-5 fleet. “We have to actively work to change that culture to be more results-oriented,” she said. Some companies are even shifting to unlimited vacation time, she noted, in the belief that this will focus employees on results.

Too often, she said, work-life balance is narrowed to an issue of women and child-rearing. “Work-life balance goes beyond that type of activity.”

The panelists said another key issue is the crushing student-loan burden. Hedden said these loans are not the 3-percent interest versions of previous generations, but loans with 7- to 8-percent interest rates that require large payments.

“This is a big issue,” she said. Unlike companies like Google, Amazon and Apple, companies in the aerospace sector do not typically provide large signing bonuses to wipe out a significant portion of education debt, Hedden added.

In the area of training, some companies have cited shortcomings in new-employee critical thinking and teamwork. Steve Gorrell, an associate professor at Brigham Young University, said he is seeing progress toward addressing that through the unmanned-aircraft initiative for students run by the Aerospace Partners for the Advancement of Collaborative Engineering.

“We focus on multidisciplinary design,” he said. The students break into teams that design and build different parts of a small unmanned aircraft, integrate the components and then fly the plane. “What we’re finding from this [initiative] is that it’s helping to narrow that skills gap between academia and industry that’s been identified,” Gorrell said.

On the topic of retention, the panel suggested that there is no substitute for involving engineers in fascinating, high-stakes work. Lockheed Martin’s Mike Hawes, vice president and Orion program manager with Space Systems, said the company has had no trouble retaining talent to design and build NASA’s multibillion-dollar crew capsules.

“I frankly expected a fairly high rate moving off Orion after our test flight in December. Frankly, we didn’t see a very high transition rate from that, and that’s very helpful to the program,” Hawes said, referring to the space test of an unmanned Orion capsule last year.

That said, Hedden said engineers typically want to move to other roles every 24 to 36 months, according to the workforce study. They don’t mind working on one kind of plane for decades, she said, but they want a change of tasks.

 

 

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Engineers Juggle Work, Personal Obligations

Panelists: Moderator Barbara Esker, NASA ARMD; Elizabeth Bierman, Honeywell Aerospace; Amanda Billiot, Pratt & Whitney; Jim Free, NASA Glenn Research Center; Klod Kokini, Purdue University

By Hannah Godofsky, AIAA Communications

A panel of university and NASA aerospace experts at the Propulsion and Energy 2015 forum traded ideas about how to improve work-life balance across the U.S. aerospace community.

Session moderator Barbara Esker of NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate framed the issue with a personal anecdote: “I am a proud member of the sandwich generation, or more accurately, as I think of it, the vice-grip generation,” she said, referring to the stresses of meeting work and family obligations. “I am often painfully and tightly caught between both childcare issues and challenges and elder care issues and challenges,” she said.

Amanda Billiot of Pratt & Whitney Human Resources said that roles within families can come in many forms. She asked for open-mindedness about this fact. “I think there’s a stigma against stay-at-home dads,” she said, relating her experience as her family’s breadwinner.

Billiot offered several ideas for improving work-life balance for engineers, including establishing greater autonomy. “Where the money is, where our future lies, is in things like working remotely,” she said. “And don’t tell me we already have this. In a lot of places, it’s so strict that it loses its appeal in terms of work life balance.”

Elizabeth Biernan of Honeywell Aerospace said working remotely is growing in popularity. “I’m not the minority anymore. It’s something that a lot of people take advantage of.”

Klod Kokini, a professor at Purdue University, said a better work-life balance would help schools retain a talented engineering faculty. “Work-life balance is an important piece of actually getting and recruiting and retaining [all] these faculty [members],” he said. “If you look at the overall faculty engineering presence …15.2 percent of engineering faculty are women, and about 6.2 percent are underrepresented minorities.” He said that industry is not currently “benefiting from the tremendous talent that’s out there.”

According the panelists, women are more likely to drop out of academic roles in engineering in part due to the demands of family life. “Anything we do to support women faculty benefits all the faculty,” said Kokini. He said Purdue has faced challenges with recruitment, in part due to the need to help spouses find new employment during the relocation process.

Jim Free, director of NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio, spoke about the challenges he has faced in his own work-life balance. “My whole life is work and home and my kids,” he said, describing his attempts to juggle work meetings and travel with family commitments, coupled with the demands of his children’s school and activities.

He said that work demands and travel inevitably cut into family time, but that he uses tools like FaceTime to communicate with family when he is away. “I miss stuff all the time, and I try and minimize it, but I will be honest with you, it’s very difficult for me,” he said.

He described how challenging it can be to unplug from work-related thoughts and communications even during off-hours. “Sometimes it’s the job you’re in, and that’s me rationalizing it; and sometimes you make the choice, you’ve got to pick one or the other,” he said.

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Diagnosing the High Costs of Rockets, Satellites and Airplanes

Panelists: Moderator Michael D. Griffin, Schafer Corp.; Frank Culbertson, Orbital ATK; Mike Hawes, Lockheed Martin Corp.; Lee Monson, retired from Boeing Co.

by Ben Iannotta, Editor-in-Chief, Aerospace America

Why are government satellites, rockets and aircraft so darn expensive? The answer can be boiled down to a single word: Fear — fear of test failures; fear of bid protests; fear of losing political support.

That was the dominant message from “Cost and Affordability of Future Systems,” a 2015 AIAA Propulsion and Energy Forum panel.

“The paranoia of making a mistake and losing your job drives people to overdo things,” said former space station astronaut Frank Culbertson, now president of Orbital ATK’s Space Systems Group.

When it comes to rocketry, “we’ll be more successful in operations if we do have a few [test] failures sometimes,” he said. Even when there is a flight failure that destroys cargo or lives, “you’re going to be stronger the next time around, just as we were in the shuttle program, just as we are in Antares, just as SpaceX is doing right now,” Culbertson said, referring to the explosion of an Antares rocket in 2014 and the June disintegration of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on its way to orbit.

To illustrate how excessive caution drives up costs, Culbertson told a story about attempting to test a new solid rocket motor.

“It took us 30 days to get clearance from the customer to actually do that test, when if we had just done the test and it failed, we could have had it going again in two weeks,” he said.

Fear also affects costs in subtler ways. Government contracting officers live in fear of successful bid protests, so they “lay out a paper trail of fairness and transparency,” said former NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin, now chairman and CEO of Schafer Corp. “It’s nice that America chooses to be fair, but it’s extremely expensive to do so.”

That’s not a problem in the commercial world. “Procurement decisions are made for individual items based on what will yield the most value, or the perceptions of the value, in the end product,” Griffin said.

Griffin asked panelist Lee Monson, a retired Boeing Co. executive who once sold airliners in the Middle East, whether airlines have any desire to own the aircraft technologies they rely on. Monson said airlines care about the configuration of seats and also about the “long-term maintainability” of their planes, but they don’t want responsibility for the design and technology.

“Because of the regulatory forces that get imposed upon them, they would just as soon that that stay with the manufacturer,” Monson said.

t’s understandable for the airlines: “So, if NTSB” — the National Transportation Safety Board — “has a problem, they want it to be with Boeing, not them.”

In the government, fear of losing political support for large undertakings has historically led managers to distribute work across as many U.S. states as possible. The issue persists in such areas as missile defense and large Air Force programs, Griffin said.

Mike Hawes, vice president and Orion program manager with Space Systems at Lockheed Martin Corp., said the political motivations for distributing work are sometimes overstated.

“There are a lot states that I buy stuff from that I don’t have a political reason to go buy from that state. So, I rankle at that a little bit,” he said, meaning the notion “that it’s all politically driven.”

In one sense, fear is not necessarily a bad thing. In the commercial world, noted Griffin, market forces are intense. “Almost everyone in the company is co-aligned in their motivations. Executive bonuses, executive salaries, even continued employment is contingent on doing things in a very balanced way,” he said.

In government procurement, “we need something to substitute for market forces,” Griffin said.

 

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Electric Airliners: Finding the Missing Ingredients

Panelists: Moderator Rubén Del Rosario, NASA’s Glenn Research Center; Michael Armstrong, Rolls-Royce; Marty Bradley, Boeing Co.; Andrew Gibson, Empirical Systems Aerospace Inc.; Charles Lents, United Technologies Research Center; Johannes Stuhlberger, Airbus

by Ben Iannotta, Editor-in-Chief, Aerospace America

Creating an electric passenger plane capable of carrying more than 100 people will require persistence and an unprecedented cross-domain collaboration among aircraft designers, battery makers and the auto and marine industries, said members of a panel at the 2015 AIAA Propulsion and Energy Forum in Orlando, Florida.

“How do we get all these different communities, all these different subject-matter experts, together to go and execute a real system?” asked Marty Bradley, a technical fellow at Boeing Co. and chairman of AIAA’s Green Engineering Program Committee.

Bradley and other experts spoke during the session “Aircraft Electric Propulsion — Bridging the Gap.”

Bradley suggested that AIAA could play a major role in bringing together multiple disciplines, starting within the aerospace sector itself.

“We had some meetings on this, and we had at least five or six committees that all thought they had a share in this. So getting that group of people organized in joint sessions like this is a good start,” Bradley said.

The panelists waded into the question over the feasibility of developing a large commercial aircraft that would be powered by fuel and electricity — a hybrid — perhaps on the way to an all-electric aircraft. Moderator Rubén Del Rosario of NASA’s Glenn Research Center, paraphrasing a question submitted online, steered the discussion to whether miracles were needed before a hybrid propulsion system could be enabled.

“I’ll throw out the systems integration challenge here,” chimed in Charles Lents, a principal research engineer with the United Technologies Research Center.

Andrew Gibson, president of Empirical Systems Aerospace Inc., said questions about thermal management and power distribution are hot on his mind. Beyond that, he said, “I’m more concerned about the miracles that need to happen in how these cross-discipline teams operate.”

Steering the conversation back to the technical realm, Bradley said he sees only one miracle required: “That’s in energy storage.”

Johannes Stuhlberger, a power system expert with Airbus, lauded the auto industry for creating consumer confidence in batteries through the excellent safety record of hybrid autos.

That’s “a great success, I would say, because in the beginning, everyone was afraid about batteries, instantaneous burning and things like that,” Stuhlberger said.

Michael Armstrong, an aerospace systems engineering specialist with Rolls-Royce, said aerospace experts must look “at multiple industries to pull from,” but he also gave a nod to the auto industry.

“Without their assistance in this area, we would have a longer haul to get where we need to go,” Armstrong said.

Bradley volunteered that he drives a Chevrolet Volt.

“I’m trying to reverse engineer,” Bradley said. “Wouldn’t it be better if I was meeting with the engineers at General Motors. Now, I wonder: Have we done things like that?”

Armstrong said he works with technologists at Rolls-Royce who have expertise with hybrid buses and vehicles. He said the best advice is sometimes “what things not to do.”

The challenge will be in translating vehicle technology to aircraft, Armstrong said. “What does a hybrid car look like versus what does a hybrid aircraft look like? There are differences that we’ll have to make sure that we respect.”

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Digitization, Electrification and Additive Manufacturing to Revolutionize Propulsion and Energy

Panelists: Moderator Graham Warwick, Aviation Week & Space Technology; Jean Boti, Airbus Group; Douglas Juul, Lockheed Martin Corp.; Mary Beth Koelbl, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center; Neil R. Garrigan, GE Aviation

by Lawrence Garrett, AIAA Web Editor

Whether with aircraft, space launch vehicles or missile systems platforms, the aerospace propulsion and energy sector is undergoing dramatic changes sure to revolutionize the industry.

From advancements in additive manufacturing to rapidly advancing digitization and bandwidth, connectivity and cybersecurity, the propulsion and energy sector is working hard to keep pace. That was the main theme during “Technology Development and Trends in Propulsion and Energy,” a panel at the 2015 AIAA Propulsion and Energy Forum.

“Additive really is revolutionizing the way we design hardware,” said Mary Beth Koelbl, deputy director of the Propulsion Systems Department with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. “It’s enabling you to design hardware with geometries and shapes and features that you’ve never really been able to do before.”

NASA is being asked to certify additive manufacturing in many areas, Koelbl said, such as for its Space Launch System. She added that NASA has designed everything it could with additive manufacturing and, as a result, there has been “a dramatic reduction in part count and equally dramatic reductions in cost and schedule.”

Koelbl believes additive manufacturing has the “ability to be a very disruptive technology way beyond NASA” and said it’s important that the industry work together to determine how to certify additive manufacturing for flight applications and how to make it more integral in design.

Douglas Juul, manager of systems technology with Missiles and Fire Control at Lockheed Martin Corp., highlighted some of his company’s missile production programs, which rely on the same types of propulsion systems. He said that although his organization is not a propulsion provider, they incorporate propulsion solutions as part of their products.

“Risk and value are some of the major issues that we struggle with, because … the propulsion systems are a major part of the structure in our weapons” Juul said. “They integrate and get involved into every aspect of all of our systems, whether it’s electrical, mechanical, aerodynamic.”

Jean Boti, executive vice president of research and technology with Airbus Group, cited “Flightpath 2050,” Europe’s vision for aviation plan, and said that Airbus has been aiming to reduce carbon emissions by 75 percent and noise by 65 percent by 2050.

Boti called the task huge and said that Airbus decided to take it on with disruptive technologies. He said their idea is “to have this electric propulsion that is assisted by thermal.”

Neil R. Garrigan, executive manager of aviation advanced technology with GE Aviation, said that with the growth of electrification and digitization — in which more bandwidth will be needed — as well as more autonomous systems and sensors and the proliferation of unmanned vehicles, a key question is: “What might that world look like, and how will it impact propulsion and energy systems as we know them today?”

Garrigan said alternative and renewable energies and energy storage, whether electrical or thermal, will “be a big enabler and potentially a disrupter.”

“We should all be preparing to shape the future of flight,” Garrigan said. “It’s an exciting time. We’re passionate for it, and we like to share the passion that everyone else has as well.”

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Model-based Design Reshaping Disney Parks

Speaker: Micahel Tschanz, Walt Disney World®

by Lawrence Garrett, AIAA Web Editor

Engineers can be a great asset to creative storytelling, and model-based design and engineering are helping to reshape The Walt Disney Co. theme parks, said Michael Tschanz, director of technology and analysis with design and engineering at Walt Disney World, during “Developing Creative Storytelling Using Model Based Design,” a lecture at the 2015 AIAA Propulsion and Energy Forum.

There’s been a change in culture at Disney over the past 15 to 20 years, Tschanz said, “in how we build and design new attractions, new guest-facing experiences, and some of it has to do with transferring technology that all of you have been involved with for decades.”

Tschanz, “an old aerospace guy” who spent 13 years at Texas Instruments working on guidance and control systems, said he learned there that a lot of design work could be done before actually building things.

“In the aerospace industry, that’s paramount … you’re not going to be able to just throw some things together and hope it flies,” Tschanz said. He said Disney is trying implement more detailed and rigorous engineering principles among “frankly, a group of people who don’t normally think about this on a daily basis.”

Tschanz said Disney is incorporating a lot of design and engineering tools, from 3-D simulations and analysis, to model-based design for attractions, agent-based design, animation design and even a transportation simulator.

Walt Disney World is 47 square miles and Tschanz is responsible for helping to ensure everything works correctly. That, he said, is the job of design and engineering.

To help oversee these operations — from boats to monorails, trains and rides — Disney relies on mechanical, electrical and computer engineers. As Tschanz put it: “Literally, across WDI, there’s 1,200 disciplines in and of itself.”

Tschanz shared some of the inner workings of some of Disney’s attractions, such as its Rock ‘n’ Roll Coaster, which uses a Linear Synchronous Motor Launch System, where engineers oversee things like ride track, software controls and braking systems.

Because Disney does not have the luxury of building and redesigning, Tschanz said it has started to use more model-based design. Adopting that methodology was a challenge at first. Tschanz said Disney started small with only a couple of projects initially.

“Once we’ve built up some of these scientific methods, of figuring out how to look at rides and shows in a very precise physics and mechanical way, then we can start pulling all that technology back to the beginning and then using it to help design all the way through the design process,” Tschanz said.

He added that Disney designers also do a lot of work in computational fluid dynamics, mainly due to their water rides, and use ride development simulation tools in design processes. He said this technology has been very helpful and “allows us to get the story exactly right.”

Tschanz said Disney also is taking a “foray into model-based design techniques,” citing its Star Tours ride as a prime example, where they put C3P0 as the pilot droid. Model-based design helped Disney “understand how both the animated figures will work functionally over time, and how will they will look from an aesthetic and from a creative design perspective,” he said.

Tschanz also discussed Disney’s use of agent-based modeling in which the models are looking at tens of thousands of people, or “entrance and exit dynamics.” He said designers can use agent-based modeling for cars as well as people. Tschanz said this work is significant because “we want to make sure any of the work that we do on Disney property can support the amount of people that will be driving and using vehicles on the park itself.”

Tschanz concluded his remarks by citing one of his favorite Walt Disney quotes: “We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious, and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”

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