The Centre for Modelling and Simulation (CFMS) brings its expertise in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Advanced Simulation (AS) and High Performance Computing (HPC) to support the Development of Advanced Wing Solutions (DAWS) project.
This ATI funded project brings together CFMS, Airbus UK, Aircraft Research Association (ARA), International Techne Group and the universities of Bath, Liverpool and Southampton.
Reducing environmental impact in a commercially sustainable way is now the priority challenge facing the aerospace industry. Improving an already highly optimised product calls for imagination and innovative technology integration, as well as disruption in the associated design process. This spans from the physical construction of new wing designs, to how those designs are virtually prototyped and simulated. The work undertaken by CFMS within the DAWS project focuses on new methods for streamlining the prototyping phase of design, and simulating aerostructures to understand their performance without having to undertake physical trials.
For streamlining prototyping, CFMS is developing a solver-holistic modelling pipeline for automating the creation of complex structural simulations. This aims to remove the labour intensive and repeated manual creation and analysis of structural models early on in the design phase. Automating this process enables much greater exploration of the design space of possible configurations to find a more optimal solution.
Building on this, CFMS has investigated combining traditional structural stress and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models into a single fully coupled analysis. Traditionally, the fluid and structural domains are simulated separately, then indirectly combined using different processing methods. Solving both domains simultaneously allows more nuanced transient interactions to be fully captured and the simulation to be completed faster.