Wing of Tomorrow

The Airbus Wing of Tomorrow project aims to investigate the latest manufacturing techniques for an A320 sized wing. The wing, when completed, will be installed in Airbus’ wing testing facility in Filton to verify its structural integrity. As part of this exercise, FIRMA worked with a team from Expleo to re-design and analyse the wing-to-fuselage loading interface rig.

This loading rig is designed to apply the loading to the wing that it would experience from the fuselage connection. The rig must also connect to discrete hard points in the test building floor and spread the large actuator loads effectively.

FIRMA ended up completely re-designing the rig from scratch to meet the brief. The whole rig was modelled using MSc Apex and a full stress report was supplied to the customer to verify the structural design.