Karl Roush
(Advisor: Prof. Dimitri Mavris)

will propose a doctoral thesis entitled,

Preliminary Design Framework for Heritage Technology Reuse in Long Duration Aerospace Operations and Sustainment

On

Monday, November 13 at 11:00 a.m. EST
Collaborative Visualization Environment (CoVE), 

Weber Space Science and Technology Building (SST II) 
and
Click here to join the meeting

Abstract
Large scale aerospace projects tend to build on already-established processes and technologies. However, these heritage elements were not designed with more modern requirements in mind. The incompatibility of these requirements, combined with an increasing duration of the post-design phases, leads to significant Operations and Sustainment (O&S) challenges. This constraint has been documented as worsening in GAO reports, RAND studies, and Congressional Reports; it is a prime consideration for military and civilian stakeholders.

The core problem lies in utilizing heritage technologies (n-1 generation or earlier) while dealing with long-term O&S. Early design decisions and ongoing support efforts are interconnected, but temporally distinct. Past efforts to tackle this issue exist, with guidelines for producibility and manufacturability, but they are often tailored to large-scale manufacturing in other industries and/or novel designs. This work focuses on the early aerospace project design phase and identifies three main gaps.

Firstly, current solutions/best practices for reducing O&S issues generally lack considerations for long duration sustainment, especially when reusing heritage technologies. This causes designers to rely on expert opinions, siloed between conceptual design and implementation. Secondly, existing early design approaches of representing the O&S phase are based on other fields, e.g., large scale simpler manufacturing. They are too general and do not represent the realities of a broad, shallow, and highly specialized aerospace supply base. Thirdly, there is limited consideration of disruptive rare events (e.g., suppliers going out of business), which are more likely to occur as the O&S duration for projects continues to increase.

The research aims to address these gaps and produce a set of corresponding deliverables specifically tailored for immediate deployment. The first deliverable identifies gaps in existing producibility guidelines and offers a future avoidance framework, akin to a pre-flight checklist, in the context of long-duration O&S with heritage technologies. The second deliverable enhances the learning rate modeling of the aerospace supply base, building upon concepts related to probabilistic modeling in preliminary design space exploration. The third deliverable applies existing concepts in quantifying tail events from fields like safety and financial portfolio management, offering cross-discipline, innovative insights for aerospace long-duration Operations and Sustainment.

Committee

• Prof. Dimitri Mavris – School of Aerospace Engineering (advisor)
• Prof. Brian Gunter – School of Aerospace Engineering
• Prof. Daniel Schrage– School of Aerospace Engineering
• Dr. Elena Garcia – School of Aerospace Engineering
• Claude Russell (Russ) Joyner II – Aerojet Rocketdyne/A L3Harris Technologies Company