US 7,623,996 B1Granted

Mass morphing system and method

AssigneeTextron Innovations Inc.

InventorMark E. Beyer

Life of this patent

Estimating the term…

Loading patent…

Abstract

Disclosed is a system and process for creating mass property models for new product designs. Engineers are able to use this robust model to perform various assessments. The system morphs legacy mass property values into new design project configurations. This is done by building linear transformations in four-dimensional homogeneous coordinates. The transformations capture source and target geometric characteristic shapes. Filtering techniques are used to retrieve relevant source mass properties from the database. These detailed mass properties are collected into bay wise functional groups and then converted to equivalent mass particulates. These point masses are transformed from the source domain to the target domain, and summed back together to generate target mass property data. The process outputs detailed mass property distributions used in engineering models and reports and is continually updated to accommodate detailed designs throughout project development.

Claims13

Dependent claims

A system for generating a mass-property model of a target aircraft design comprising:

a digital processor;
a process controlled by the digital processor for implementing steps comprising:
extracting mass properties regarding a source aircraft design from a database;
establishing source homogenous coordinates defining at least one discrete source bay;
incorporating said source homogenous coordinates into a source matrix;
using target homogeneous coordinates defining at least one target bay;
incorporating said target homogenous coordinates into a target matrix;
calculating a transformation matrix using said source matrix and said target matrix to generate transformed source coordinates and target coordinates;
converging said transformation matrix for transformations to minimize differences between the transformed source coordinates and the target coordinates, wherein said converging comprises:
setting a fourth dimensional element of each homogeneous coordinate to unity in said source matrix;
initializing a fourth dimensional element in said target matrix at unity;
and
repeatedly changing the value of said fourth dimensional element in said target matrix until normalization is achieved;
using the source homogenous coordinates and the target homogeneous coordinates to generate new target coordinates;
morphing source mass property information into target mass property information using said new target coordinates to generate the mass-property model;
and
generating a report including characteristics of the mass-property model.

14 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.