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March 2, 2006
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(left to right: Joe Buck, Engineering Group Lead, Mustang Weight Control; Bill McKeighan, Engineering Specialist, Mustang Weight Control; Kishore Jayakumar, Software Engineer, Textron Global Technology Center, Bangalore, India; Lewis Campbell, Textron Chairman, President and CEO; Aasiri Fernando, Senior Engineer, Mustang Weight Control; Mark Beyer, Senior Engineering Specialist, MIS Product Development.) |
Mr. Incredible, from the movie The Incredibles, dives off a building, hair blown back, cape flapping in the breeze. Not many people would see this and relate it to jet design. But then again, most people aren’t Cessna’s award-winning engineer Mark Beyer. “The computer-generated animation you see at the movies is my favorite analogy of what’s behind MassMorphing,” says Beyer, a senior engineering specialist for product development at Cessna Aircraft Company. He and a team of four engineers created the innovative process. “These three-dimensional animations are built in pieces - arms, legs, hair. When combined, they become the full character we watch on the movie screen. MassMorphing allows us to use similar mathematical formulas to morph together parts of a jet.”
In essence, when Cessna engineers develop a new aircraft, they start with a computer-generated three-dimensional plan. By using the morphing process, they can pull portions of their previously designed aircraft into this model. It might be a wing from a Cessna Citation X, an engine from a Cessna Sovereign, or another much smaller component. Once the mass properties of parts and systems are altered, they create a new and unique aircraft.
But don’t let the simplicity of this explanation fool you. There are thousands of parts and multiple systems on an aircraft. All are interrelated and extremely complex. It’s this very complexity that frustrated engineers in the first place and prompted Beyer and his team to find a solution.
“In the past, the manual process to design a new aircraft was extremely time consuming,” said Bill McKeighan, a senior engineering specialist and group leader of Cessna Mass Properties - New Product Development. “It often took three to five months to thoroughly explore one single change in a jet’s design. But now, through MassMorphing, it takes us only days.” McKeighan, who is an end-user of the application, says there is also less chance of missing a specific component. “And because we can focus on making improvements, we ultimately achieve a more competitive product with greater appeal to our customers.”
To date, more than 30 Cessna engineers have been trained on this cutting-edge technology. MassMorph team member Kishore Jayakumar, an IT engineer for Textron Global Technology Center in Bangalore, India, sees it as an application that could be utilized by other Textron companies. “MassMorphing could be applied to Kautex fuel tank designs or Textron’s Fluid & Power pump designs to save both time and money.”
Beyer says he’s humbled by the acclaim the MassMorph project has received
(recipient of the Cessna 2005 Technology Project of the Year award this past December and Textron’s prestigious Chairman’s Award for Innovation in 2004), but he isn’t resting on his laurels. “The focus now is to find a way to quickly and more accurately determine cost estimates for aircraft.” He hopes to implement cost morphing processes sometime in the spring.
As for competition, as far as Beyer knows, there is still no other process quite like it in the industry although there is keen interest. When asked to sum up MassMorphing, Bill McKeighan puts it this way: “It’s the most innovative technology I’ve seen in my area of work in the past 25 years.”
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