US military creating digital 'clones' of the F-35 fighter jet to predict in advance when components will break Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3593667/US-military-creating-digital-clones-F-35-fighter-jet-predict-components-break.html#ixzz48wgA8lpJ Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
A Nasa spinoff is recreating everything from the Hubble Space Telescope to an F-35 fighter jet to find out when they will break.
Engineers at Sentient Science are building 'digital clones' that can actually replace testing on the real item.
They hope it will create a 'DNA test' for material to predict when they will break.
The military is using the system in the new Joint Strike Fighter F35 to predict when components will fail - and replace them before it happens.
'What we set out to do was really hard,' says Ward Thomas, president and CEO of the Buffalo, New York-based
company.
company.
'We set out to decode the material genome.'
The company believes that the resulting software, called DigitalClone, can accurately predict the lifespan of a machine.
It creates a digital twin of a component or system.
Based on what it knows about the physics of friction, lubrication and wear, the software then predicts its subject's future performance, lifespan and failure.
To test the software, the team worked with Nasa's Glenn Research Center.
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Tim Krantz, a mechanical components engineer at Glenn, was presiding over a database of test results regarding gears with various shapes, materials, lubrications and processing parameters.
One gear design — a spur gear used for helicopter drive-train research — had 25 years' worth of data and proved to be the perfect test subject for DigitalClone.
To prove it worked, the company's engineers created a digital model of Nasa's chosen spur gear from a helicopter to compare their predictions with the historical performance data gathered.
'This Nasa gear performance database is pretty unique,' Krantz says, explaining that companies often don't release performance data on their products.
To prove it worked, the company's engineers created a digital model of Nasa's chosen spur gear to compare their predictions with the historical performance data gathered.
'It perfectly matched,' Thomas says.
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Sentient carried out 11 more test runs with companies like Boeing, Sikorsky and General Electric.
'Instead of running physical tests for a year and getting three test points, we can give you thousands of test points in days,' Thomas says.
'You will have the world's most tested products, which will run in the field at the lowest cost to operate.'
By late 2014, the technology was in use on the Hubble Space Telescope.
The military was using it in the new Joint Strike Fighter F35 and the Blackhawk, Apache and Super Sea Stallion helicopters. Medical device company Zimmer uses it to analyze hip implants.
The eight wind turbine operators who installed DigitalClone Live were able to optimize their machines and bring the price of wind energy from 11 cents per kilowatt hour down to about 3.5 cents.
'This technology is doing as much to make renewables economically viable as the federal government's provisional tax credit,' says Thomas. 'We're so grateful to NASA for showing up at the time they did.'
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