Jacobs Takes Product Design to New Heights with Generative Design in Aerospace
00:06 So NASA's current mission is ultimately to go to Mars, that's the big goal for all of us. The question is, how do we get there? We have to design in a whole new realm. These spacesuits have to be able to go farther and last longer than they have ever before. There's a lot of things we have to learn about living in space and how to develop the right technologies to get there and bring people home safely and not just go one, two, three, four, five times, but go and stay.
00:40 So my role at Jacobs is working on the exploration portable life support system, also known as the XPLSS. And the portable life support system, if you just look at the suit in general, it's kind of the backpack-looking thing on the back of the suit, and it provides life support functions. So things like providing oxygen for the astronauts to breathe inside the suit, fans to circulate air in the suit, pumps to circulate water for cooling, things like that. The further our missions take us from Earth, the more and more and more pressure we have put on minimizing mass of system every single ounce or kilogram of mass matters.
01:10 We need to find a way to blend that safety and reliability with reducing mass at the same time. It's extremely important for us to find that right balance. We found a perfect fit for the PTC generative design technology in the design for spacesuit backpack. We have several components that are structural components that hold different objects within our spacesuit backpack, either their brackets, housings, base plates that we want them to achieve their goals of doing their function.
01:41 But we also want them to use as little mass as possible because the astronauts mobility is affected by how heavy their backpack is. And having a tool like generative design enables us to explore that full suite of manufacturing methods and apply whichever one is best to this given part. If we set up the analysis right, we're going to have a part that is truly optimized, which is the goal of our whole design process. So this is something that helps us leapfrog steps that we currently have in our process to arrive at a final goal. And we're utilizing newer technologies, new methods, new materials.
02:13 It allows us to shrink things, make things more optimized for weight. We're trying to squeeze out a lot more performance out of this backpack. So since we started using generative design technology, we've seen mass reductions up to 50 percent which is critical in the area of aerospace for reducing launch weight and increasing the mobility of our astronauts. The most exciting thing about generative design to me is it challenges my biases. As an engineer, I like right angles, flat surfaces, round dimensions. And Generative Design says that may not be the best solution.
02:43 And so if I want to be the best possible engineer at my job, I look to generative design to find those kind of solutions.