From Cradle to Grave

With the transition to a circular economy, the increasing importance of product-accompanying services and the further rollout of electric and autonomous mobility, expectations on continuous product data management have increased considerably. Data is collected and evaluated from the development stage all the way to the end of life of a product. The resulting insights are in turn incorporated into the intelligent engineering of the next product generation. To this end, data from a wide variety of sources such as IT systems, platforms or databases must be collected and linked to each other. They can only be made accessible consistently across all possible applications if the different data formats and models are standardized and exchanged in a seamlessly linked way – cross-company IP-security included.

Electrifying the aviation industry 

Why is all this necessary? For example, to support the establishment of electric air travel: By moving away from fossil fuels, flying will become way less emission-heavy. In order to enable this, aircraft manufacturers need new concepts based on data-based models: »The drive distribution has to be rethought, which changes weight distribution and aerodynamics,« says Dr. Kai Lindow, head of the Virtual Product Creation division at Fraunhofer IPK. »However, many additional aspects must be included when developing electrified aircraft: From testing to new business processes, contracts and regulations, everything has to be mapped and integrated.«

In projects with companies such as Rolls-Royce and Chesco, as well as the German Aerospace Industries Association, our researchers are therefore developing holistic lifecycle concepts.

Continuously efficient in all areas

Continuous data management unlocks new possibilities in other areas as well. In collaboration with industry partners, our researchers developed a powerful digital networking platform that enables manufacturing companies to manage energy efficiency in innovative ways. The platform not only integrates operational but also structural data, such as system topologies or model libraries. 

Our researchers are breaking new ground in the qualification of welded components by linking data from different types of simulations – such as welding and forming simulations – which do not have any interfaces. This makes it possible to virtually simulate the behavior of complex components with different materials and sheet thicknesses and avoid resource-intensive experiments.