The aircraft maker's Wing of Tomorrow program leverages 3DExperience tools to cut months from the development cycle.
Airbus is reinventing the wing to make it fit for the age of carbon-neutral aviation. The company’s engineers are taking advantage of a 3D digital “co-architecture” environment that enables them to optimize the wing design and the manufacturing process in one go.
Since 2016, teams at the European aerospace giant’s Wing Technology Development Centre (WTDC) in Filton, U.K., have been playing with unconventional ideas that could change how aircraft-makers approach wing design. Pressed by the need to eliminate the carbon footprint of aviation by 2050, in line with international commitments to fight climate change, Airbus is experimenting with lighter composite materials to reduce weight. The company also wants to make wings longer and leaner to increase lift and lower fuel consumption. The goal of the research program, called the Wing of Tomorrow, is to offer a menu of different technology solutions “to enable the development of the next-generation wings,” Airbus says. The work has already produced results, and the first demonstrators are being built to undergo testing next year.
Yann Lewis, the Wing of Tomorrow’s head of engineering, says Airbus has built the demonstrators using a novel approach that relies on advanced digital tools allowing engineers, designers and manufacturing experts to interact with each other in the same 3D digital environment in real time.
“When we came to assemble the Wing of Tomorrow wing boxes, we had very few instances where there was a clash with manufacturing requirements,” Lewis says. “We were able to get it right the first time, which I haven’t seen in many other Airbus programs before. That’s of great value because in any sort of serial production environment, if something doesn’t work right the first time, it takes a long time to fix it.”
Finding paths for automation
A wing box is the load-bearing structure of an aircraft wing to which other components, such as flaps and wingtip devices, attach. Assembling these structures has traditionally been a tedious, manual process, says Lewis. Technicians must at times climb inside tight fuel tanks located inside the wing boxes to install fasteners and fuel pipes. In the future, Airbus hopes to make the assembly process more automated to speed it up and make it more comfortable for the personnel. The collaborative digital design approach trialed as part of the Wing of Tomorrow program helps the engineers identify which tasks could be taken over by robots and how to redesign the factory to optimize workflow.
“If you look at the wing assembly process of the single-aisle A320 aircraft [Airbus’s flagship narrow-body aircraft manufactured since 1984], it’s very manual,” says Lewis. “As part of the Wing of Tomorrow program, we are looking for opportunities for automation, the use of robots for positioning parts, clamping parts, drilling. It’s quite a big step change.”
Lewis added that although the design changes may seem subtle, the engineers wouldn’t be able to identify them without working in a common environment with the manufacturing experts from the start.
“We would likely have encountered problems or clashes between robots and structure later on during the build when it is too late to change the design,” he says.
This step change in the way aircraft are built is called for. According to the International Civil Aviation Organization, demand for air transport is on the rise and will continue to grow over the next 20 years at a rate of 4.3% per year. For Airbus, currently the world’s biggest manufacturer of passenger planes, that means the need to build more aircraft and build them faster, in addition to ensuring that this new aircraft produces less carbon emissions
A platform for possibilities
Airbus has been using computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided engineering (CAE) tools for more than four decades, pretty much since the technology was introduced in the 1970s. For more than twenty years, the firm has been relying mostly on the Catia CAD and CAE software suite developed by French company Dassault Systèmes. However, Airbus’s adoption of Dassault’s 3DExperience software platform, which integrates Catia with Delmia (manufacturing), Enovia (PLM) and other tools, opened new possibilities for Airbus.
“We can collaborate and come up with designs that are lightweight, efficient and perform well structurally,” says Lewis. But we can also be more sympathetic to the manufacturing process. We can visualise the proposed solution and model the type of tooling that we might need to create certain attachments, see whether there is enough space and whether it’s going to be ergonomic.”
The simulations are instantly fed data from completed hardware tests to compare accuracy of the predictions with real-life performance and, in turn, improve fidelity of future simulations. The 3D CAD model also automatically links with the finite element analysis (FEA) model that engineers use to analyze the resiliency of the assembled wing boxes. The linking of the CAD and FEA models means that any updates in the design are immediately reflected in the simulation, shortening the development cycle by “months of time,” says Lewis.
“We’re able to run and show the results of any simulations within the same environment, as well as capture data from the tests that we do and any manufacturing steps that we have,” says Lewis. “We can pull all that data into the same environment, which means that we have a much better understanding not only of how to design [the product] in the first place, but also as we move it through the design and manufacturing cycle”
Simulation advances wing testing
In early 2025, the team at Filton plans take one of their perfected wing boxes and attempt to break it. Attached to a test airframe inside a giant hangar, the wing will be pulled up and down by a system of levers with a gradually increasing force until it cracks. Before breaking the wing for real, the engineers will simulate each of the 12 tested load scenarios digitally.
“Thanks to the simulation, we have a first confident view of how that wing is going to behave during the test,” says Lewis. “That means we can identify areas of interest where something interesting is going to happen on a particular load case. That allows us to put the right instrumentation onto the test specimen to monitor and capture the behavior.
Over the years, the engineers have conducted many smaller-scale test, the results of which were captured by simulation software, giving the team high confidence in the results of the simulations. Such experiments have been part of Airbus’ testing procedures for decades, but only recent advances in computer technology allowed them to model the entire wing-breaking process.
“It started off with pitifully small and simple models,” says Lewis. “Like three or four rib bases, because we didn’t have the computing power to resolve more. Now we have a simulation model that covers the whole of the wing in a way that predicts the types of behavior that in the past were limited to those smaller models.”
Lewis says that simulations will never fully replace hardware tests but will reshape the “testing pyramid” in a way that proves various design solutions more quickly and earlier in the process.
“You can do more and more quickly, explore a wider design space and also compress some of the timescales,” says Lewis.
In the future, Lewis foresees many of the tasks performed by engineers today being taken over by artificial intelligence. Data collected in the collaborative simulation environment could help Airbus begin experiments and train algorithms that could be used to design wings beyond the Wing of Tomorrow program.
The demonstrators developed as part of the Wing of Tomorrow project are not yet intended for any existing or planned aircraft line and might take decades to take to the skies. The engineers are proposing, for example, to add four-meter-long folding wing tips to the wing boxes to increase their lift while at the same time maintaining the aircraft’s dimensions within the limits required by existing airport infrastructure.
