The entire aircraft industry, led by the military, is migrating to high-strength composite materials for substantial portions of the aircraft structure. A streamlined, efficient and automatic system of expert engineering analysis of composite part repairs is needed to support aircraft logistics, repair, maintenance, and overhaul. The need for a new system extends to all new aircraft designs for the entire aircraft industry. A new system is needed for the flight support crew, including engineers and mechanics. A new tool is needed that enables automated engineering assessment of composite aircraft part damage, nondestructive evaluation, residual strength, repair planning, and post-repair flight safety. A new tool is needed to replace the paper repair manuals and drawings that are no longer needed or even safe to use, since the results obtained from 'cookbooks' are unreliable for composite parts. It needs to be useable by service personnel with little or no training, yet be constantly under control of engineering, automatically providing the basic engineering data needed to support detailed, expert analysis if and when needed. It needs to be easily deployable, and the data it produces needs to be automatically archived.

FE Associates' flagship software product, Automatic Repair Planning/Part Archival System (ARPPAS), was developed to allow flight support crews to quickly, efficiently, and accurately assess and plan repairs to worn or damaged composite aircraft parts. ARPPAS allows flight maintenance and repair staff to reduce aircraft maintenance time and cost; improve composite part repair quality; enhance flight safety; eliminate paper repair manuals; automatically establish comprehensive electronic repair records for the fleet; and effectively control the engineering of every repair.

FE Associates has an established relationship with the US Navy and has demonstrated competency in Defense contracting. ARPPAS and MetaFEM were developed with funding from the Navy and have obvious application to Navy missions. In addition, ARPPAS and MetaFEM have the potential to revolutionize management of the repair and maintenance of the entire military aircraft fleet.

As ARPPAS continues to be developed, it will have applications in land vehicles and sea crafts designed with composite materials. ARPPAS' revolutionary finite element analysis tools and automatic archiving will dramatically reduce costs of the maintenance of military vehicles while at the same time increasing the efficiency and accountability of the repair process.

U.S. Navy photo by 1st Lt. Shannon Collins