The TOICA R&D project intends to radically improve the way thermal studies are performed within aircraft design processes by simultaneously modelling and simulating in a collaborative environment the thermal behaviour of aircraft airframe systems, equipment and components. The resulting overall thermal aircraft architecture will be developed and exploited in a Behavioural Digital Aircraft (BDA) environment that will be tailored to support the activities of the thermal architects and experts.
The efficient management of thermal energy on board modern commercial aircraft has emerged as a priority for aircraft manufacturers and their supply chains in order to propose competitive solutions to new market demands whilst continuing to reduce development costs. This new priority, which requires the “thermal behaviour” to be managed from both a top overall aircraft level view point and in detail down to a sub-component level, has become more complex due to the following inter-related challenges:
1) Modern aircraft use significantly more electrical systems in preference to hydraulic and pneumatic systems.
2) Increased use of composite materials in aircraft structures leading to new complex constraints for the design.
3) New requirements to improve passenger thermal comfort and to provide in-flight entertainment and power supply for passengers’ mobile devices.
4) Environmental European targets (reduction of fuel consumption, of CO2 and NOx emissions, of noise, etc.) becoming more challenging.
The key to addressing these thermal challenges lies in the ability to model and simulate the thermal behaviour of the whole aircraft including systems, equipment and components to the required level of detail and quality. The thermal simulation process must be made more robust and thermal related data from across the extended enterprise must be gathered seamlessly.
TOICA is a European Union co-funded project which started in September 2013 and will run for 36 months. It has a budget of 26.5 M€ and has a Consortium of 32 partners led by Airbus.
Eurostep has previously participated in the very successful aeronautics research projects VIVACE and CRESCENDO both within the 7th Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013).
“We are very proud to be part of TOICA”, says Håkan Kårdén, CEO Eurostep Group. “In VIVACE we were part of developing the VEC Hub (Virtual Enterprise Collaboration Hub) based on Share-A-space and in CRESCENDO we used Share-A-space as Collaboration Hub enabling collaboration between domains and organisations. TOICA will build on this as well as well as the web services developed in CRESCENDO. These were tested by CRESCENDO members and the goal is to make them public as a standard. We certainly appreciated the approach taken in VIVACE and CRESCENDO and look forward to continue working together with the leading European aerospace organisations”, ends Mr Kårdén.
About Eurostep: Eurostep delivers software and services for product lifecycle management with a particular focus on the exchange and sharing of data within and between enterprises. Eurostep’s flagship product, Share-A-space® is software that supports collaboration across the life cycle of products. Services range from pre-studies to the implementation and support of systems. Eurostep has subsidiaries in Sweden, the UK, Finland, France, Germany and the US and has blue-chip customers in a variety of industries including automotive, aerospace, defence, energy, high tech, and building & construction.
Disclaimer: This text reflects only the author’s views and the Union is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.
For more information, please contact:
Håkan Kårdén, CEO Eurostep Group, at +46 8 4101 3150
hakan.karden@eurostep.com
