Daimler Benz Aerospace Airbus

Countries throughout the World have recently been quite active in considering the state of their environment. Currently, there are fairly many forums also within the European Community where environmental hazards of industrial operations are discussed. The European Union's Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS), for example, is a voluntary scheme designed to promote positive and proactive environmental management in the manufacturing industry. The main challenge for industrial companies to anticipate the environmental consequences of their operations is to collect, control, and interpret all the data embedded in the daily activities. In non-process industries, this is systematically been done only in a handful of companies. Moreover, the environmental hazards of the companies' processes have not usually been summarized. Only in rare cases has the reduction of environmental hazards seen as a way to minimize companies' fixed costs and possibly cut down variable running costs as well. To combine the environmental and economical factors of the operations of an industrial company, the decision makers need sufficiently intelligent and flexible computer-aided planning tools. The objective of Enviro-MEND is to develop two model-based Best Practice Pilot decision-support applications for the above-described domain, i.e., environmental economics. The purpose is to prove that such a system is able to help companies to define and model their key processes (or core parts of them) and, based on the model, to collect important data on the environmental hazards of their operations. Methodologically, Enviro-MEND is a core part of the company's Total Quality Management System and integrates, therefore, to the company's quality data management system. The data on the processes and the environmental hazards are stored in Enviro-MEND in an object-oriented model. Consequently, the environmental hazards of the operations can be analyzed along various criteria (e.g., consumption of energy, pollution caused by transportation, reuse and recycling of production, used materials, packaging, packing material waste management, etc.), and reported in an understandable form. The other part of the model facilitates investigation of possible alternative actions to decrease the environmental hazards and to find the balance between the achievable improvements of the operations and financial factors. The model and attached application can help an industrial company to find an optimum balance between environmental consequences, environmental investments, and the operating costs. Enviro-MEND delivers two best practice pilot applications - one in the domain of aircraft manufacturing and the other in the domain of automotive windshield manufacturing - for decision making in industrial economics, and an analysis how those applications may be used in routine environmental management of industrial companies. The industrial end users within the Enviro-MEND consortium intend to exploit the results of the project internally, and integrate the resulting environmental applications to their quality management systems. Additionally, the end user companies are committed to extend the initial coverage of the pilot applications to other operating units within the surrounding enterprises. The Enviro-MEND approach helps the companies to: - improve the optimal usage of resources, - improve the optimal usage of energy, - find best possible compromise between environmental consequences and operating costs, - systematically improve the state of the environment, - manage reverse logistics of used products. The software and consulting companies of the Enviro-MEND consortium are determined to commercialize the project results and to merge them to be part of their product and service portfolio.

BE95-1120 A cooperative Action to apply Particle Image Velocimetry to problems of Industrial Interest - EUROPIV Considerable progress has been made, during the last twenty years in the field of aerodynarnics. Although many problems are still to be solved in turbulent flows, the mean flow characteristics can be quite accurately defined by the combined use of computer codes and wind tunnel experiments. To improve their aircraft and engines efficiency, the manufacturers have to look more and more to the 3D, unsteady aspects of the flow in some specific subdomain or in particular flight or working configurations. Complex viscous flows, separated flows, coherent structures in turbulence and transition phenomena become of primary importance in such situations. In these fields, computer simulations are still limited and much understanding has to be gained from experiments, both on the design and on the code validation point of view. An experimental approach to such flows and phenomena needs non-intrusive measurement methods, able to give a quantitative description of the instantaneous flow characteristics in a field rather than at one single point. Particle Image Velocimetry (PIY) has been developed for that purpose and gives access to the most primary variable: the velocity field. This method has been demonstrated at a laboratory scale in several teams in Europe and in the USA. The aim of the present project is first to reinforce the knowledge of the method by taking advantage of the complementary research and development work performed by the participating teams. This is made possible by the extension of an existing activity in the frame of GARTEUR, to a broader European cooperation. The second objective is to prepare the future by studying the possible extensions of the present state of the art to access to the full three components of the instantaneous velocity field in a plane. The final and most crucial objective of the proposal is to demonstrate the applicability of the method to problems of industrial interest. This will be done at full scale for aerodynamic testing in industrial wind tunnels and at laboratory scale for turbomachinery. In order to achieve the targeted objectives, the research program has been divided into five tasks: - a critical evaluation of the existing know-how by use of a travelling test experiment and a network accessible database, - a further development of the method, on some specific aspects (large flow seeding and video recording), in order to increase the efficiency and quality of the measurements, - a study of ways to extend the method to measure the full three components of the instantaneous velocity field in a plane through stereoscopic and holographic experiments in both aerodynamics and turbomachinary situations, - a full scale test in an industrial wind tunnel and a comparison of the results with numerical simulations, - the exploitation of the results obtained and the preparation of a thematic network proposal. The completion in a two years program of these five tasks should lead to the formation of a strong European community in PIV which will be able to perform high quality velocity field measurements in flows of industrial interest. It should also allow large cost savings by the way that all the partners involved will not have to develop and test all the possible solutions available for performing PIV measurements. For this purpose, the partnership structure has been divided in order to cover most of the solutions under study worldwide. The know how developed in the frame of the EUROPIV project will be usable and used immediately in other European programs like ENIFAIR or APIAN. It will be used also by the seven partners of AERA in their large facilities.

BE95-1053 Structural Maintenance of Ageing Aircraft - SMAAC Aircraft manufacturers as well as airlines and maintenance suppliers are facing the fact that the age of the fleets in the civil transport aircraft business are increasing dramatically. This is also true for airplanes manufactured in Europe. In order to maintain the high safety standard of today's aircraft during higher service life times, considerable inspection and repair actions have to be accomplished. There are different "typical" ageing aircraft phenomena, particularly multiple site damage (MSD) and multiple element damage (MED), which are not covered by the standard fatigue and damage tolerance approach. Other phenomena like corrosion may even add to or enforce these problems. The durability of aircraft structures containing MSD and/or MED will be reduced unless corrective actions are taken at an early stage. In extreme cases, such as occurred in the "Aloha" incident, the structural integrity of the aircraft could be compromised by the presence of MSD and MED. In order to provide reliable time of inspection and of embodiment of preventive repairs for existing aircraft as well as better long term durability for future aircraft, the following main research tasks are conducted: - Theoretical and experimental investigations to derive engineering models for the assessment of the initiation of MSD, growth of MSD and residual strength of structures in the presence of MSD or MED. - Usage of both in-service and experimental/theoretical examinations for the assessment of deteriorating effects, which may increase the ageing aircraft effects in certain areas of the fuselage or wing structures. The methods developed above may also be used for the assessment of the fatigue and damage tolerance behaviour of old repairs.

The project's major achievements are: - adaptation of dependability methodology to ATM systems - object model (supported by the standard Object Modelling Technique (OMT) formalism) and data-flow diagrams, representing the functions and data of a generic ATM system - classification of services' importance - allocation of severity levels to functions and components - allocation of dependability objectives to functions and components - assessment of the adequacy of database management systems' techniques to ATM systems, with regard to dependability requirements.

The increase of air traffic demand and the foreseen integration of air and ground segments implies additional but more stringent, and even more critical, requirements in the field of air traffic control. In the context of all the foreseen evolutions of ATM systems and their architecture, their fault tolerance design has not yet been given deep attention. The DAAS project initiated a systematic and rigorous methodology to define, build and assess dependability requirements of ATM systems, special attention being paid to integration of existing standards of the airborne field into this methodology. Future work and results Based on the ATM dependability objectives defined in DAAS, potential applications should be oriented towards the preliminary specification of a high reliability core application. This application could be, for instance, the Trajectory Negotiation Process, because it is a good example of airborne application involving air and ground computers in an air-ground ATM cooperation process. An additional application dealing specifically with ground topics, such as multisector planning, would have to be envisaged to complete the scope of this project follow-on. On the basis of low level airborne and ground dependability criteria, this preliminary specification would optimise, in terms of fault tolerance strategies, the hierarchical structure concept introduced in the previous Generic Approach to ATM System (GAAS) study, where central airborne/ground components are distributed through hierarchical layers. The results of DAAS can be reused in related follow-on projects under the Fourth Framework Programme, the following issues being explored in the early stage: - survey and analysis of state-of-the-art in ultra-reliable architecture applications; - comprehensive examination of data network infrastructures, current bottlenecks and technical trends; - consequent organisation of fault-tolerant algorithm methodology for GAAS-like architecture design (airborne and ground-based architectures) through the use of distribution, redundancy, processor grouping, fault-handling policies and mechanisms (fault masking, fault refinement, recovery blocks). Exploitation potential and plans The DAAS methodology can be directly applied in projects where dependability objectives have been fixed at the requirement level and for which a dependability study has been planned (for example, a dependability study will be required for the future EATMS prototype). In projects for which no dependability study has been planned but where implicit dependability requirements exist (as for instance the ECARDA project PATIO), the following results of DAAS could be helpful at the functional level: object oriented model of a generic ATM system; allocation of importance levels to services; allocation of severity levels to functions.