Critical aerospace components are serialized to build a digital thread throughout the product life cycle phases, covering traceability and quality. However, when most of us think about quality, only the design, development, and manufacturing phases come to mind. But what happens when the product goes into operation? Is there any benefit to extending this digital thread beyond manufacturing?
After aircraft have been operational for some time, they require maintenance. The MRO (Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul) activities include inspection and repair or replacement of complete systems or parts. These activities provide valuable data that help to improve the design or manufacturing of those components.
The MRO center maintains a service bill of materials (SBOM) for each of the different products, for instance, aircraft engines that they repair. The SBOM is broken down into a component level, and each will have its list of critical characteristics, nominal, and tolerances that help to indicate whether the component is ready to fly. Knowing the actual performance of the product in the field may lead to design improvements that could extend the useful life of the part. The designers can use the wear and tear values after operation to compare with the estimated useful life for the components to validate the part model or generate a change request to improve the component performance. The virtual twin can also increase its accuracy by adding actual performance results and hence improve predictive analytics models.
Making the part number, serial number, and inspection results available to the manufacturer would extend their understanding of the component performance to validate or improve the accuracy of the virtual twin. Inspections performed at the MRO shop using 3D models allow indicating the location of NCRs. Using the serial number, the manufacturer can compare the issues found at MRO with the performed repairs (or concessions as known in the industry) during fabrication to determine whether the repair standards are robust, or improvements need to be made.
The manufacturer could aggregate data from multiple MRO centers to detect a concentration of issues on the 3D model, finding patterns that could point out the root cause of the problems – either design, manufacturing, or a combination of both.
In summary, extending the scope of quality beyond manufacturing and providing feedback to design and manufacturing increases the value that we create for our customers, such as increasing the useful life of components, improving manufacturing operations, and raising the accuracy of the 3DEXPERIENCE virtual twins.
