Risk-Based Design and Certification of Aircraft: A Systems Engineering Approach

Abstract

Current practice for verification of structural integrity of air vehicles in the U.S. Air Force is design, build and test. The size of future aircraft fleets will be small, thereby, making full-scale testing undesirable due to its impact on the program cost and schedule. Moreover, some of these aircraft will operate in extreme thermal-acoustic-mechanical conditions that will be difficult to simulate during full-scale lab tests. Therefore, an alternative certification process is needed to verify the structural integrity of these aircraft. A new risk-based design system is proposed in this paper that can incorporate uncertainties and variations in load and strength models into the design process. This process uses a top down approach where the reliability goal is first identified for the overall system and then this information is propagated to the component level through functional diagrams and event trees. These reliability goals would determine a margin of safety for strength that can be used to design various components. In this paper, reliability based design of a representative wing spar is presented.

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