Aircraft Design Process

Anıl Dursun

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Academic Writing

Inst. Luz Hernandez

15.05.2015

Process of Designing an Aircraft

The Wright brothers created first airplane on December 17, 1903. It was one of the biggest dreams for humanity. This invent affected every parts of life like transportation, military etc. Nowadays, we can see a lot of aircrafts everywhere. Furthermore, technology is evolving. This process changed by time. But understanding design process is really hard. This process is based on physics and mathematics. Aeronautical engineers improve process with calculations and experiment. There are two types of aircraft’s design and their design process is often divided into several stages; conceptual design, preliminary design, detail design.(Stanford).

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Undoubtedly we can say that these are war machine. Their purposes are based on war skills. That is why they should have more speed and powerful engine. Certainly, these purposes effect their design process. In addition, the most expensive aircraft is a military aircraft all over the world. B-2 Spirit bomber cost is 2.4 billion dollars (Time Magazine, 2010). The B-2 is hard to detect via infrared, acoustic, electromagnetic, visual or radar signals. (Time, Magazine, 2010). This example can show us to how expensive to design and manufacture an aircraft. Therefore, all different types of aircrafts have different design process depend on their purposes.

First step of design process is conceptual design. ”We typically design hundreds of aircraft concepts at the "conceptual" level for every one that ever actually flies.” says Raymer, D. It is a good example to understand how conceptual design is important. The design process starts with the aircraft's predetermined purpose. According to their purposes the path of design will has a shape. Issues are civil and military that mentioned it before. If it is for civil economic, safety, low system cost, long service life, if it is for military mission accomplishment ,survivability, damage tolerance are important in

The airplane is now simply a machine to be fabricated. The precise design of each individual rib, spar, and section of skin now takes place. The size, number, and location of fasteners (rivets, welded joints, etc.) are determined. Manufacturing tools and jigs are designed. At this stage, flight simulators for the airplane are developed. (Allen, R) During detail design, the selected aircraft is translated into engineering data required to support tooling and manufacturing activities. (Author Stream).

To sum up, there are two different aircraft design types commercial and military and their design process have three phase. First one of them is conceptual phase. This phase mostly about aerodynamics, propulsion and flight performances. Second phase is preliminary design. In this phase, there are fluid dynamics calculations and configuration analyses. Lastly, detail design is manufacture phase of an aircraft. All of these steps must be done carefully. Today aircraft design is really important and people should follow these steps as a model but also should improve to create