The Study Of Manufacturing Cost And Maintenance Cost Methods In Aircraft Design

Cost occupies an important position in the development of aircraft projects, and it relates closely to the competitiveness of the project. For civil aircraft, direct operating cost (DOC) is the major indicator on design economics. The aircraft design departments, the manufactures and the operators should all pay give high attentions to cost reduction measures during the life cycle of the product. It is therefore necessary to study various cost estimation methods of manufacturing and maintenance.This work first introduces the cost merits used in civil aircraft's design. Direct Operating Cost is commonly used in measuring the economic performance of civil aircraft, and by analyzing the various elements in DOC, it can be seen that the manufacturing and maintenance cost have major impact upon DOC. This paper introduces the common estimation methods for manufacturing cost and maintenance cost. The advantages and disadvantages of these methods are analyzed, along with their applicability in different aircraft design phases. In order to improve the accuracy of the cost estimation methods in different phases and more accurately analyze the sensitivity of new materials, techniques and management models on the cost, a new multi-level cost model is presented, and implemented in CAE tool. The new model is applied to the analysis of wing beam structure. Sensitivity analysis was carried out for different geometry, material and manufacturing parameters. Finally, the method is combined with the aerodynamic analysis based on vortex lattice method to formulate a cost optimization problem with aerodynamic constraints. The study showed that the proposed multi-level cost model can be used in the various stages of the design process and can be further embedded into a fully DOC-based design process.