A TRIZ-Axiomatic Design Framework with Semantic RMp Mapping for Material Selection: Application to Aircraft Brake Disks

Abstract

The selection of materials for aerospace purposes requires rigorous mapping between design requirements and material properties, especially for critical safety components like aircraft brake disks. Traditional selection methods like Ashby charts or tabulated property databases often struggle with conflicting vague, fuzzy, or high-performance requirements. This study proposes an integrated approach combining the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ), Axiomatic Design (AD), and information modelling (IM) principles to map functional and non-functional product requirements to material properties systematically. TRIZ resolves contradictions between requirements, while Axiomatic Design deals with functional independence and traceability towards the design parameters. Information model enables structured traceability from high-level requirements to quantifiable material properties to support semantic consistency and cross-domain reasoning. The methodology is validated through a case study on aircraft brake discs, where carbon-carbon composite is identified as the most suitable material based on a quantitative Requirement-Material property (RMp) evaluation that prioritizes safety and thermal resilience over cost. The results highlight the potential of the proposed framework to support traceable, structured, and safety-driven decisions in complex engineering design. The integration of TRIZ, Axiomatic Design, and structured information modelling for traceable, safety-driven material selection is the core novelty of this work, and has not been previously formalized into a reusable framework for aerospace applications.