New Entrants in Aerospace: Composites as the Deciding Factor

The complexity of the multiple interactions between material choices, tooling selection, design methodology and manufacturing processes must be fully appreciated in order to devise the most robust and efficient approach to optimizing composite aerostructures to achieve lower costs, higher quality and reduced weight. This is a fundamental change in airframe design. Engineers will be forced to rely more on engineering tools than on established design rules as they adopt more composite content into their designs. 

Composite materials will have an ever-increasing impact on engineering tools, with software required to assist engineers in determining appropriate assembly methods and enable the analysis of performance, cost and producibility. These engineering tools must help engineers reduce time-to-market by efficiently providing them the data they need to develop optimal designs with the appropriate balance of weight savings and cost-to-manufacture, while meeting performance criteria. 

Primary Topics: 
• Composite materials will have an ever-increasing impact on engineering tools 
• Software will be required to assist engineers in determining appropriate assembly methods 
• The use of engineering tools will help reduce time-to-market 

Presenter: John O'Connor 
John O'Connor is the Director of Product & Market Strategy at Siemens PLM Software. Mr. O'Connor also served in many roles at VISTAGY, which was acquired by Siemens in 2011, ranging from application support and technical sales management to business development. Prior to VISTAGY, Mr. O'Connor was a Senior Design Engineer at Lockheed Martin where he led a variety of product design teams. Mr. O'Connor holds an M.S. in Materials Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.