Aerospace & Defense

During the last decade, aircraft manufacturers have been in a race for mass production, often delaying the adoption of smart digital technologies. Nowadays, the pandemic has forced them to take a step back, allowing time to prepare for the necessary structural transformations and to expand digital capabilities in order to prepare manufacturing operations for the re-start: gain the agility to launch new programs faster than ever before, to reach greater levels of industrial efficiency, and to emerge from the crisis with greener and leaner processes – less scrap, more throughput, more profitability.

Investing into 4.0 technologies to extend existing digital capabilities may look like an extra financial stretch at first glance, yet, this is mission-critical to anticipate business recovery, for both manufacturers and suppliers. Stand-alone CAD and CAE designs using empirical and historical safety margins and traditional test-and-learn protocols relying on physical testing will be abandoned for an end-to-end digital thread that seamlessly connects product design, manufacturing, and in-service operations across. This is what we, at ESI, call Virtual Prototyping.

Virtual Prototypes empower engineers to digitally validate a design’s performance in terms of product quality, production capacity utilization, safety, and security, or in terms of operations and maintenance costs. It brings confidence about manufacturability and the most efficient manufacturing process in the early development stages. Supplemented with Hybrid Twin technologies, engineers are equipped with the ability to experiment virtually with real data and real physics, simultaneously. This is the extra degree of freedom and early confidence engineers need to design, manufacture, and assemble right the first time - without real tests or prototypes, before cutting a single piece of metal, and with zero downtime during final operations.