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A data-driven minimum stiffness prediction method for machining regions of aircraft structural parts

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Abstract

Large thin-walled structural parts have been widely used in aircrafts for the purpose of weight reduction. These parts usually contain various thin-walled complex structures with weak local stiffness, which are easy to deform during machining if improper machining parameters are selected. Thus, local stiffness has to be seriously considered during machining parameter planning. Existing stiffness calculation methods including mechanical methods, empirical formula methods, finite element methods, and surrogate-based methods are either inaccurate or time consuming for complex structures. To address this issue, this paper proposes a data-driven method for predicting local stiffness of aircraft structural parts. First, machining regions of aircraft structural part finishing are classified into bottom, sidewall, rib, and corner to further define the minimum stiffness of machining regions. By representing the part geometry with attribute graph as the input feature, while computing the minimum stiffness using FEM as the output label, stiffness prediction is turned to a graph learning task. Then, graph neural network (GNN) is designed and trained to map the attribute graph of a machining region to its minimum stiffness. In the case study, a dataset of aircraft structural parts is used to train four GNN models to predict the minimum stiffness of the defined four types of machining regions. Compared with FEM results, the average errors on the test set are 6.717%, 7.367%, 7.432%, and 5.962% respectively. In addition, the data driven model once trained, can greatly reduce the time in predicting the stiffness of a new part compared with FEM, which indicates that the proposed method can meet the engineering requirements in both accuracy and computational efficiency.

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Funding

This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51925505 and U21B2081).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China

    Jiarui Chen, Yingguang Li & Tianchi Deng

  2. School of Mechanical and Power Engineering, Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing, China

    Xu Liu

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  1. Jiarui Chen
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  2. Yingguang Li
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  3. Xu Liu
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  4. Tianchi Deng
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Correspondence to Yingguang Li.

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Chen, J., Li, Y., Liu, X. et al. A data-driven minimum stiffness prediction method for machining regions of aircraft structural parts. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 120, 3609–3623 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-022-08991-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-022-08991-x

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