Collaborative Design in Context for Whole Engine Mechanical Design

Decomposition is often required to make the design of complex mechanical systems tractable. However, often the resulting sub-systems are designed in isolation with little indication as to the impact of design decisions on system level performance. The following paper demonstrates the increased risk of rework resulting from the naive recombination of such seemingly optimal sub-systems and goes on to demonstrate two approaches which can potentially help. The first proposes the adoption of a design in context based approach, where sub-systems are aware of the potential impact of their decisions on the wider system. The second augments this approach with a system level coordination step employing a surrogate model. The performance of each strategy is demonstrated using a realistic whole engine mechanical model for an ultra high bypass ratio (UHBR) gas turbine as a case study. The design in context approach is demonstrated to considerably reduce the level of infeasibility at the system level, while including some system level coordination not only reduces the level of infeasibility but improves the quality of the final system design and the rate of convergence towards it.