The design philosophy for airframe safety has experienced evolution from static strength, safety life, damage tolerance and durability, to individual aircraft tracking, with a trend towards the airframe digital twin in the future. The airframe twin driven by the digital thread is a multidisciplinary, multi-physical, multi-scale, multi-fidelity, and multi-uncertainty virtual simulation system. It uses multi-source data such as online sensor monitoring, offline ground inspection, and aircraft operation history to reflect and predict the behavior and performance of the corresponding airframe physical entity during the entire lifespan. It is expected to reform the existing paradigm of airframe usage and maintenance. Focusing on fatigue life management, this study proposes five key modeling and simulation technologies, which are (a) acquisition of load and damage data, (b) multi-scale mechanical modeling of airframes, (c) high-performance simulation of damage development, (d) efficient digital twin construction based on Reduced Order Modeling (ROM), (e) Remaining Useful Life (RUL) assessment considering multi-source uncertainty and heterogeneous data. This article discusses the state of the art of the proposed five key technologies as well as future research directions, providing reference for the systematic study and engineering applications of the airframe digital twin.
In Chinese