Acceleration of Fielding Through Digital Airworthiness Certification

This work investigates the ability to drastically shorten weapon integration life cycles and reduce significant portions of weapon integration schedules. Traditionally, weapon integration schedules are limited by access to scarce physical hardware and dependent upon limited flight test and laboratory resources. Store airworthiness certification is an involved process with several time-consuming activities. Of competing interest is the desire to field hardware to the warfighter in an accelerated manner, without loss of rigor and thoroughness. To demonstrate a meaningful reduction in cost and schedule, a combined set of digital simulation and a complementary set of software and hardware components are brought together to shift development and integration activities away from dependencies on limited test facilities, limited lab and range time, limited availability of flight test aircraft and schedule dependencies on hardware delivery. The methods explored within this paper will demonstrate that meaningful and robust simulations can provide a viable means to accelerate and inform data products required for airworthiness while maintaining engineering rigor. This paper will present an overview of the role that each of the following areas contribute to weapon integration acceleration. The categories to be addresses are: 1) Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)-based separation aerodynamics, 2) vibroacoustic analytical environment derivation, 3) common weapon interfaces, 4) ARISE® as an integrated flight simulation, and 5) ARISE-in-a-Box as a highly configurable physical platform-to-store interface that integrates with the ARISE package. The approach will be outlined and a discussion of the results of the investigation will be provided.