Implementing the Digital Thread - A Proof-of-Concept

This paper was presented at the 2023 AIAA SciTech conference at Fort Washington, Maryland, USA.Current engineering processes are heavily document-centric, which can add time and cost to projects, limit data accessibility, and make it difficult to actively manage models and data consistency throughout the lifecycle of a product. Additionally, traditional data siloes limit data accessibility across departments. Similar issues exist with tools: departments use software with different standards and formats, making it time-consuming and difficult to accurately propagate changes and requirements throughout. Aerospace projects and vehicles are also often a level of magnitude more complex than products developed in other industries, requiring the coupling of multiple disciplines, which intensifies these problems. Digital Engineering and Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) provide the context, methodologies and tools to address some of the aforementioned challenges. In particular, this paper presents the development and implementation of a Digital Thread proof-of-concept for a minimum viable product. In doing so this research demonstrates solutions to the challenges of data acquisition and management, model and data connectivity, tool, and platform integration, eventually leading to the realization of an authoritative source of truth across the product’s lifecycle. Additionally, this research highlights some of the key benefits brought about by the Digital Thread, which include increased collaboration and communication, managed consistency across models and data, as well as the ability to conduct model verification, validation, and calibration - an important tenet of MBSE

Magnetised quark nuggets in the atmosphere

A search for magnetised quark nuggets (MQN) is reported using acoustic signals from hydrophones placed in the Great Salt Lake (GSL) in the USA. No events satisfying the expected signature were seen. This observation allows limits to be set on the flux of MQNs penetrating the Earth’s atmosphere and depositing energy in the GSL. The expected signature of the events was ​derived from pressure pulses caused by high-explosive cords between the lake surface and bottom at various locations in the GSL. The limits obtained from this search are compared with those obtained from previous searches and are compared to models for the formation of MQNs