Many people are putting their best efforts into controlling the pollution caused by automobiles, with ideas that range from electric cars, to cars with moss growing in their wheels.
However, airplanes are also responsible for a significant amount of air pollution, and several organisations have joined together to develop a plane that will be more lightweight, increase resource efficiency and produce fewer emissions. The European Union-sponsored project is called Bionic Aircraft and it began last year with a projected end date of August 2019. A consortium of 10 partners is working together on the project, which involves using bionic design and additive manufacturing for every part of the life cycle of an aircraft.
Roughly a year after the project kicked off, its participants are reporting their continuous progress. IT and software provider CENIT is developing a CATIA-based CAD catalogue of parametrically defined bionic features in order to create biconically optimised components.
“This provides an automated toolbox to support the cost and time-intensive manual interpretation and design of topologically optimized components in CAD,” said Jochen Michael, Senior Consultant at CENIT. “The parametrisation of features also lets the designers adjust geometries more easily. That gives us an additional efficiency and quality boost during the design process.”
By the end of the project, CENIT plans to have developed a CAD catalogue containing roughly 10 to 15 bionic features.
