Air-frame Reverse Engineering


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Challenge

In order to assist in a complete aircraft modification a complete model of the aircraft structure was required. This meant that every frame, stringer, gusset plates, even 50,000 rivets needed to modeled. The vast scope of this project required building a new team. The level of detail would go beyond engineering drawings as bends in the sheet metal due to assembly and not designed into the engineering would need to be captured and modeled.

 

 

 

 

 

The Solution

When aircraft are built they begin with the most interior structures (frames, stringers etc) and they work out eventually wrapping the skin around the structure. However in our case we need to keep the skin within .020 of the actual surface and in order to do that we needed to start with the skin and work our way in towards the center. This required a huge effort in keeping consistency both in the frame and stringer structure as well as the OML.

  • Create the OML skin
  • Work inwards using the innermost surfaces of one component  as the outermost of the next component inward.
  • Due to the scale of the project I designed workflow chunks that could be parsed out to intern level employees, greatly reducing cost.

 

 

 

 

 

  • Point Cloud
  • Interior Structure
  • Interior Structure
  • Interior cockpit
  • Surphaser Scanning
  • Structure