New Talking Aerospace Today podcast with Capital: “The Evolution of Electrical Development in Aerospace”
Capital is now featured in season three of the Talking Aerospace Today podcast series.
I’m so pleased to have this opportunity to bring you the latest information on how Capital is solving some rather intense challenges facing the Aerospace and Defense industry today. The series is called “The Evolution of Electrical Development in Aerospace” – I’ll be doing five episodes!
Trends impacting electrical design in aerospace
In this first episode, I talk about the trends impacting electrical system development and how this affects the industry on a broader scale.
The basic premise we have to remember is that achieving profitability in the A&D industry depends on executing our programs in an efficient way. And we’re always working to balance risk and innovation in these programs. Today, there are more demanding missions for our platforms, whether it’s commercial or defense.
Increasingly, OEMs need new capabilities to execute these missions and they need additional capabilities to differentiate their platforms. It seems everyone is moving more and more to implementing those differentiating capabilities with electric functions. And that’s really what’s increasing the complexity of the overall aircraft itself.
There’s another trend that’s continuing to dominate the industry and that’s greater rigor and demands around regulatory compliance. It’s becoming more difficult to generate the evidence to actually prove that you’re compliant with an increasingly large set of regulations.
And then finally, there’s a demographic shift that’s affecting companies in many industries, not just aerospace in defense, but it’s particularly impacting aerospace because aerospace has this bi-modal age distribution, where people in the baby boom are retired or retiring, and tribal knowledge is walking out the door. And the next generation really needs to be brought up to speed. So, all that great information that keeps people’s competitive advantage in play can stay inside the company.
The rise of the digital enterprise
To meet the challenges of today we need to move beyond a disconnected and largely manual labor-intensive approach. The kind of approach that has prevailed in the past. Instead, we need to move a model-based enterprise that exploits a multidisciplinary digital twin and digital data continuity to revolutionize our ability to experiment and innovate while reducing program risk.
A digital twin is basically the model of the platform and in this case, the model of the platform’s electrical system. And digital data continuity is implemented using what we call a digital thread, and this provides an ability to take information from early in the program all the way to the end, and then vice versa. So, we need to exploit that digital data continuity, to stop doing routine labor over and over again, and stop introducing errors into areas of the design the manufacturing process, and the service documentation that we’re already fine.
Too many times, we find that people do a really good job at perfecting what they have in one stage of the development process only to have it fail later, unintentionally, because of having to go from one system to another or because of manual re-entry.
Capital is meeting these demands
Capital has been involved in electrical system development for over 20 years. And this year, the Capital electrical and electronic systems development environment has broadened beyond electrical distribution systems, to electrical systems modeling and optimization, electronics software, and networks. And it’s now a comprehensive E/E development solution with direct ties to Siemens Xcelerator portfolio. And this portfolio has tentacles that extend into mechanical, pneumatic, hydraulic, and work in coordination with enterprise PLM, ALM, and systems engineering.
I go into greater detail in my first podcast. I urge you to give a listen.
If you want more information on the web, please visit our Capital A&D website. Also, if you want to read my blog on the new Siemens Capital E/E Systems development environment, please read it here, The Capital E/E Systems development solution. Exactly how has Capital evolved?
We even have a white paper: A closer look: Next generation electrical systems platform development
Alright, that’s about it now.
Don’t forget… sign up for the Talking Aerospace Today podcasts. We have some compelling and truly thought-provoking episodes underway!
Anthony Nicoli is the aerospace and defense director for the Integrated Electrical Systems (IES) segment of Siemens Digital Industries Software. He has spent nearly twenty years in the defense industry, developing electro-optic and electro-acoustic systems and businesses, working primarily in the tactical missile countermeasure and underwater imaging domains. Nicoli holds Bachelors and Masters Degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Masters in Business Administration from Northeastern University.
