Abstract
Traditional system technology modeling in conceptual aircraft design mainly relies on empirical knowledge and methods derived from conventional systems, for which valid system architecture designs are known. Since these systems have been proven valid especially from a safety perspective, detailed system safety analyses are usually not necessary. For unconventional systems and innovative technologies, on contrary, new architectures have to be designed and system safety has, therefore, to be taken into account. Therefore, the application of model-based safety assessment (MBSA) for designing system architectures in conceptual aircraft design studies is proposed. A MBSA approach based on a Simulink architecture model is presented which is tailored for use in conceptual design studies. It is applied to the cryocooling system of a hybrid-electric powertrain architecture from an already-published study. The original architecture as well as possible architecture alternatives are investigated. As a result, a safer architecture version with lower number of components can be proposed. The application example indicates that using MBSA in conceptual design benefits the latter by providing insights into safety properties of the system and by pointing out architecture safety weaknesses. This could result in safer, thus more realistic system architectures.
Highlights
The ambitious goals for the European aerospace industry, as formulated in the “Flightpath 2050” position paper of the European Commission [1] ask for new aircraft system technologies to reduce commercial aviation’s impact on the environment
Enabling the reuse of modeling elements, making possible architecture trade studies with respect to safety properties without extensive manual effort, model-based safety assessment (MBSA) seems suitable for use in conceptual design studies
The fault tree analysis (FTA) is a qualitative, graphical and deductive analysis, relating a system-wide failure condition with its root causes. This analysis starts at system level with a top-level event (TLE)
Summary
The ambitious goals for the European aerospace industry, as formulated in the “Flightpath 2050” position paper of the European Commission [1] ask for new aircraft system technologies to reduce commercial aviation’s impact on the environment. Enabling the reuse of modeling elements, making possible architecture trade studies with respect to safety properties without extensive manual effort, MBSA seems suitable for use in conceptual design studies. The contribution of this paper is twofold: First, an MBSA method suitable for conceptual system design studies is presented. It is shown via an example system from an already published design study that applying MBSA to conceptual aircraft design provides benefits for the generation of system architectures. 5, the novel MBSA approach is presented and categorized according to the systematics from Sect. 6, an example system from a previous publication is presented which is analyzed and optimized using a Matlab tool implementing the proposed approach.
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