“SIX SIGMA” AIDED DESIGN OF A FUSELAGE COMPOSITE PANEL
M. Granito, B. Gambino, G. Iannuzzo, L. Lecce
Quarterly No. 4, 2010 pages 380-384
DOI:
keywords: “Six Sigma”, composite, margin of safety, mean value, deviation standard
abstract Six Sigma Method (SSM) is included in the “Robust Design” context and allows to reduce the sensitivity to external factors during design and manufacturing phase and during the product lifecycle, too. Organisations like Sony, Honda, Lockeed Martin, Motorola, Toshiba proved to be interested in this method but, only in 1979, Motorola first took into account this method for industrial problems, with the aim of improving product quality and reducing manufacturing costs. ‘Six Sigma’ ability of meeting customer requirements (in terms of costs and quality) and its intrinsic property of identifying and quantifying design parameters influence on final product performance, makes such method a valid and powerful tool for designers. In the paper at hand, a design evolution for a composite fuselage panel is presented applying SSM. At first, basing on a Safety Margin optimized panel, the influence of the design parameters variation was estimated, assuming, as constraint, a deviation of the Safety Margin confined within ±5%. The most critical parameters resulted: the ply thickness, the material allowable strain, the lamina Young moduli along the main plane directions, the shear and Poisson modulus. By randomly varying these parameters, the FE models of novel panels, differing from the optimized one, were generated and, through the MSCNastran code, linear static and buckling investigations were performed. Predicted stress field and instability loads were used to compute the Safety Margin, thus achieving a normal distribution. Finally, allowed variation ranges of above mentioned parameters were found out, by verifying that the standard deviations fall within assigned Safety Margin range (i.e. within ±5%). The most critical parameter, both for the stress field generated and for the allowable instability load was the ply thickness, whose allowed excursion proved to be the narrowest one.