Stunning new airplane seat illustrates beauty of single data format. B/E Aerospace developed Japan Airlines' lie-flat seat using product lifecycle management solutions from Siemens PLM Software.

B/E Aerospace

When B/E Aerospace transferred seat shapes from standalone industrial design software into CAD, it lost design intent and wasted countless hours recovering from translation errors.

Siemens PLM Software technology helps revolutionize business class flight

Lie-flat seats have been called “God’s gift to air travel.” Used primarily on overseas routes, these seats make it possible for passengers to recline fully for a more restful sleep. When lie-flat seats became the must-have accommodation for first-class air travel, Japan Airlines (JAL) gave B/E Aerospace a tall order: supply us with a flat seat for business class that’s every bit as good as first class seats, or better, but design it so it takes up less cabin real estate. And one more thing – the seat should look stunning.

The stunning part was no problem. B/E Aerospace’s industrial design team is top notch. The challenge on this project was how to pack the seat’s many internal components (electronics, motors, mechanisms, AV equipment and so on) into a very tight space. This would require extremely close collaboration between industrial design and engineering.

In the past, their collaboration had been problematic due to incompatible digital tools. The industrial designers worked with standalone conceptual design software. Engineers used various CAD packages. Translation to a neutral file format was necessary for the two groups to share data. But translated files were so full of errors that the receiving party, whether designer or engineer, spent hours fixing mistakes, sometimes even recreating the geometry, before the user could work with the file. When data was transferred from industrial design to engineering,errors could be so significant that design intent was lost. From the engineers’ point of view, incoming surfaces were very difficult to manipulate. Explains Tom Plant, vice president of engineering for the company’s Seat Products Group: “There were no features on the surfaces that we could modify.”

Handling the tight packaging of the JAL seat would require constant back-and-forth between industrial design and engineering. Realizing this, B/E Aerospace decided to look for a better way to enable the two groups to share data.

NX native file format eliminates translation, eliminates problems

The solution B/E Aerospace came up with was to eliminate data translation altogether by using a single data format from styling through mechanical engineering. The company chose technology from Siemens PLM Software – NX Shape Studio for industrial design and NX Design for mechanical engineering – because these programs use the same geometry platform. “It was a very clever move on Siemens’ part to build an industrial design package on the NX geometry kernel,” says Glenn Johnson, the company’s industrial design manager. “This is currently the only way I’m aware of to avoid data translation between industrial design and engineering.”

Moving to a single data format solved B/E Aerospace’s translation problems immediately. Industrial designers and engineers worked with each other’s files in native format, with complete accuracy. They were able to go back and forth with the data as often as necessary to create the best arrangement of internal parts within the outer shell. File sharing was made even simpler by the Siemens engineering collaboration solution – Teamcenter. All that was necessary to use another person’s file was to type its number into Teamcenter.

The transition to Siemens software did more than just eliminate data translation problems. It brought more sophisticated modeling techniques to the project. “With its NX base, Shape Studio has tools that other industrial design programs don’t,”  says Johnson. “For example, Shape Studio provides the ability to create highly complex parametric surfaces that you can then  go back and modify.” Modifiable surfaces saved a great deal of time as the industrial designers worked with the client to hone the shape of the JAL seat. Having surfaces defined parametrically helped the engineers as well. “It was a tremendous advantage for engineers to take parametric models from industrial design instead of some translated geometry that they’d have to recreate,” says Plant. “When designers handed over 3D shapes created in Shape Studio, engineers could run with them.

How did industrial designers feel about using software based on a high-end CAD system such as NX? “Just fine,” says Johnson. “The first response, knowing Shape Studio’s connection to a CAD package, might be to shrink away from the interface thinking it’s too slow for free-form modeling. But that wasn’t the case. As soon as we saw how Shape Studio presents its amazing functionality in an extremely understandable manner,that mindset changed.”

B/E Aerospace saves extraordinary cycle time; new seat also wins design award

The JAL project was a resounding success, both as a product and as a test of the all-Siemens approach. The seat was nominated for three industrial design awards. To date, the seat has won the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design’s prestigious “Good Design” Award for 2002 and is now on the short list to receive an honor in “iF” (International Forum) Design’s 2003 competition. However, the seat’s beauty is far more than skin deep, with efficiently packed internal components, including electronics, motors, mechanisms, AV equipment and more.

The seat features an adjustable flat footrest that folds up to extend the length of the seat in recline position and includes a built-in massage function. The armrests fold down to create a total width in bed mode of 23.5 inches for greater sleeping comfort. The bottom line is significantly increased inflight living quarters, the best-in-class footwell available and compelling functionality. The innovative design was made possible by NX Shape Studio, which enabled optimal collaboration between industrial designers and engineers.

In addition to the better product that came from sharing native data, the JAL project showed how much time could be saved when this approach is used. On previous seat programs, industrial designers and engineers had spent up to two days of each week repairing geometry. On the JAL project, this time was put to much better use, making the seat as beautiful and functional as possible.

The success of the JAL seat confirmed B/E Aerospace management’s decision to migrate the entire seating group to PLM software from Siemens. “My role is to get the company up to the highest level of engineering efficiency possible,” says John Whiting, corporate director, engineering systems. “That’s why we are progressively moving the full lifecycle of product information from industrial design to engineering, tooling, NC programming and technical publications onto the common data format within the Siemens suite of tools.”

Download the PDF:

B/E Aerospace

Challenges:

• Create next-generation lieflat seat for Japan Airlines' (JAL's) business class cabin
• Incorporate privacy shell, full recline position, built-in massage, yet occupy less cabin real estate than first-classflat seats
• Establish development process free of data translation to meet challenges of JAL seat

Keys To Success:

• Engage product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions from Siemens PLM Software
• Use single data format (native NX) to represent JAL seat from conceptual design through mechanical engineering
• Capture seat's outer surfaces in Unigraphics NX Shape Studio; design internal mechanisms within NX Design
• Support concurrent development by using Teamcenter® to provide access to engineering data

Results:

• No time wasted translating files or repairing geometry; two days/week saved
• Accuracy in data transfer allowed conceptual design and engineering to take place concurrently
• Single data format enabled highly sculpted, tightly packaged product
• Seat won Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design's prestigious

Industry:

• Aerospace & Defense

Client's Primary Business:

B/E Aerospace Inc. is the world’s leading manufacturer of cabin interior products for commercial passenger aircraft and business jets.

Business Initiatives:

• New Product Development

Solutions/Services:

• NX
• NX Design (CAD)

Client Location:

Winston-Salem, North Carolina
United States

"I’ve used NX Shape Studio extensively for the past year and have not found a bug in it yet. It works perfectly, even when I'm doing things that would crash other packages, such as real-time texture manipulation on the latest graphics card,” he says. “Hat’s off to the developers. They obviously did a lot of testing."

Glenn Johnson

Industrial Design Manager

B/E Aerospace

"We've been migrating our organization to Siemens software. Eventually all data, from conceptual design to downstream operations such as technical publications, tooling and NC programming, will be created in NX and managed by Teamcenter."

John Whiting

Corporate Director, Engineering Systems

B/E Aerospace