CONCURRENT ENGINEERING: Research and Applications Functional Product Life-cycle Simulation Model for Cost Estimation in Conceptual Design of Jet Engine Components

As functional (total care) products emerge in the jet engine industry, the need for product life-cycle models capable of definition and evaluation of life cycle properties increases, since functional products (FP) includes both hardware and service. Recent life-cycle models are intended for hardware products and mostly handle design and manufacturing knowledge. The aim of this article is to present a design approach that extends the evaluation capabilities beyond classical hardware design and manufacturing evaluation. The focus has been to introduce evaluation of manufacturing and post-manufacturing activities in evaluation of conceptual designs. For this purpose, a model has been proposed to handle the information flow between teams when developing structural jet engine components. A case study, in which the proposed model was used in cooperation with a jet engine component manufacturer, is presented. Aspects concerning design, manufacturing, performance, and maintenance of jet engine flanges were included in the example by means of a knowledge based engineering (KBE)-system coupled to databases and spreadsheets. The model is more suitable than recent work for the development of hardware parts of functional products (HFP), since knowledge from more product development disciplines is included. As the engineer changes the design and directly assesses the life-cycle cost (LCC) and how the changes impact the interface to other jet engine components, more knowledge on the impact of design decisions is available at hand for the engineering designer than without the model.