Unified Life Cycle Engineering: An Emerging Design Concept

Current engineering practice for a component such as a jet engine disk almost always involves a serial approach. The disk is first designed for maximum performance (e.g., minimum weight). The design is then sent to the manufacturing department which defines appropriate production approaches and may request some redesign to facilitate manufacturing. Finally, product support considerations such as inspectability and repair receive attention, but by now it is often too late to impact the design. This, of course, is an overstatement but is not too far from the truth for most components. The emergence of computational plenty offers opportunities to change the present practice towards a concurrent approach which has been called Unified Life Cycle Engineering (ULCE). [1]