Rolls-Royce Accelerates Digitalization to Power Sustainability

Aerospace enterprises are racing to launch their latest sustainable flight & air mobility innovations. Reduced emissions, new energy sources, and emerging paradigms for urban air mobility drive new engineering decisions that could introduce risks for the people who operate, build, and maintain those products. 

New concepts in airframe and propulsion engineering challenge previous assumptions in aircraft design and may require brand-new architectures. What worked for the first century of powered human flight might not be appropriate for the future of air transportation. To accelerate the development of first-of- their-kind products, enterprises are leaning toward digital transformation and virtual prototyping. Unfortunately, human interactions with products in key processes, like assembly or maintenance, are often left until later in the development process when physical mock-ups and operable prototypes are available. 

To speed up the delivery of innovative aircraft, keep costs down, and avoid the late discovery of inefficiencies, aeronautic OEMs understand they must leverage digital solutions. OEMs like the Boeing Company, suppliers like Latecoere, Safran Group and Rolls Royce, and their extended enterprises rely on Virtual Reality software to power collaborative virtual workflows, so that teams can experience physical interactions with yet-to-be-realized aircraft designs without waiting for construction or requiring traveling to a common site. 

For example, one of the problems that Rolls-Royce engineers encounter is accessibility to the engine within a limited packaging space. To improve the safety and efficiency of service tasks, Rolls-Royce engineers use IC.IDO to virtually validate these human-centric operations allowing life-like exploration and task validation. Uncovering these issues often gives a wider appreciation of integration challenges faced with cross-functional collaboration enabling product and process optimization much earlier in the development phase.