The Airframe Digital Twin: Some Challenges to Realization

A new structural modeling concept, the Airframe Digital Twin, for designing and maintaining airframes is proposed. The Airframe Digital Twin is a tail number specific computational model of an individual aircraft. It has the potential to improve the way U.S. Air Force aircraft are managed over their entire lifecycle by creating individualized structural management plans. The Airframe Digital Twin can provide configuration control for each aircraft in the inventory. Through computational simulations performed with an Airframe Digital Twin, it can serve as a virtual health sensor, and provide a forecast of future maintenance needs for an individual aircraft. The Airframe Digital Twin concept is considered possible because of advances in high performance computing. An essential part of the Airframe Digital Twin is the ability to reduce the uncertainty in the model with increasing service experience through Bayesian updating.