How CAD Streamlined Design and Assembly of Aircraft Electrical Systems
Pilatus Aircraft Ltd., previously a small aircraft manufacturing company, has now become a leading manufacturer of single-engine turboprop aircraft by embracing technology. Pilatus is the only Swiss based company that has developed, built and sold private aircraft and training systems worldwide. Pilatus considers Electrical Computer Aided Design (ECAD) as the biggest support behind their great success. They rely on ECAD to optimize the performance of the electrical system of the aircraft.
The Vice President of Research and Development for Pilatus, Bruno Cervia, mentioned that the company faces a new ECAD challenge. He said it was desirable to better incorporate ECAD data with that from other domains, for instance Siemens Team center product lifecycle management software. In order to overcome this issue, the company installed the Capital software suite made by Mentor Graphics Corp. in November, 2011. There are 17 programs in the suite that helped Pilatus experts effectively and economically define, construct and service electrical systems and wire harnesses.
Cervia mentioned that software implementation puts forward two main challenges to Pilatus. The first challenge was proper integration of the Capital and Teamcenter programs so that engineers could make previously manual operation sequences automatic and optimize new designing abilities. The other challenge was helping the engineers to preserve their productivity while transforming existing ECAD designs of the company into Capital’s data-centric design. This conversion allowed accessible design work to be used again in aircraft programs. “The software facilitates our designing team to make inroads for our products through integrated electrical system architectures. This will help in saving weight and life cycle costs to customers,” says Cervia.
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