Mar 15, 2021,10:33am EST|
Virtual Twins Are Helping The U.S. Military Keep Its Older Aircraft Flying
Jim Vinoski
Advances in materials and digital technologies have had the beneficial effect of allowing us to keep older military aircraft active long past their originally-designed retirement dates. The most prominent example is the B-52 Stratofortress bomber, which entered service in 1954. It’s currently slated to remain part of the bomber fleet into the 2040s. At that point some B-52 airframes will be nearly 90 years old. There can be big challenges with keeping such older equipment flying: acquiring needed spare parts, effectively modernizing aging systems, and reconfiguring designs for new mission parameters, for example.
The B-52 is an extreme case, but many other military aircraft date back to the 20th century. The Sikorsky UH-60L Black Hawk helicopter debuted with the U.S. Army in 1979, and the Rockwell B-1 Lancer bomber (originally designed as a successor to the B-52) entered Air Force service in 1986. Now those latter two warbirds are benefiting from a high-tech project at Wichita State University (WSU), where the National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR) is completely disassembling one of each of them, and using 3D scanning and reverse engineering technologies from Dassault Systèmes to create digital twins of each and every part of the airframes.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimvinoski/2021/03/15/virtual-twins-are-helping-the-us-military-keep-its-older-aircraft-flying/?sh=57b137f971b2
