Computer Applications in the Development of Efficient Aircraft Structures

Abstract

The emergence of electronic computers has brought about a revolution in the analysis of aircraft structures in the past decade which is now generally accepted throughout the Industry. But the major impact of computers on design has, in my opinion, not yet been realised and I hope, in this short paper, to show how powerful a tool they can become in the hands of imaginative design engineers. The direct benefits to the designer lie in the ability of the computers to perform large amounts of routine arithmetic in a short space of time. This capability enables us to obtain an insight into structural behaviour and to consider the influence of the aircraft environment and design alternatives from the earliest stages of design. By the development of general purpose computer programmes for handling routine calculations the structural designer can be freed from much of the laborious calculation associated with complex structures and he is able to devote more time to creative work. An even more important indirect benefit is the basic re-thinking of design processes which is necessary in order to reduce them to routine arithmetic. We begin to realise that many aspects of efficient design such as continuity, cost and weight can be introduced as quantitative parameters instead of relying on intuitive compromise.