Modern Digital Twins Give New Life to Legacy Aircraft

In the aerospace industry, airframe programs can last for decades. The 747, for example, has sustained a fifty-year production run, but maintaining legacy airframes presents a significant engineering problem: aircraft designed on paper blueprints and early CAD systems are still in service, and replacement parts and modifications are still needed.Translating old renderings into forms that can be used by modern aviation companies and operators is expensive and ad hoc. To address this problem, a USAF sponsored program by the Wichita State University’s National Institute for Aviation Research has created a digital twin of an entire B-1 Lancer airframe, a large and complex strategic bomber. The results so far demonstrate enhanced, lower cost maintenance, suggesting that digital engineering may be the way forward for the many global operators of older aircraft.Access all episodes of This Week in Engineering on engineering.com TV along with all of our other series.