Advanced Numerical Methods and Software Solutions for Aircraft Design and Analysis

Kurzfassung

To significantly contribute to the EU target of climate neutrality in 2050 while concurrently maintaining safety standards and competitiveness, the aviation sector faces a transformation that will affect the design of aircraft. The design and optimization process need to be substantially accelerated and to mitigate the high financial risks in order to deliver new, emission-reduced aircraft timely to market. This is achievable with an extensive and integrated usage of digital tools throughout the design and analysis process. The introduction of high-fidelity numerical methods permits a reliable evaluation of new technologies and designs especially at the early stages of the design process and avoids expensive and time-consuming testing on physical demonstrators. The development and industrialization of disciplinary methods for external aerodynamics include turbulence and transition modeling, scale-resolving simulation methods, numerical algorithms and surrogate modeling. Based on these methods as well as on other disciplines, multi-disciplinary applications (MDA) and optimizations (MDO) are ¬¬¬¬developed and demonstrated for relevant aircraft configurations by making use of high-performance computing (HPC) resources. Our established software products like the DLR-TAU Code [1] are widely used in European research and aviation industries. The SMARTy toolbox [2] covers more recent requirements for reduced order and surrogate modeling including AI-based methods as well as uncertainty quantification for robust design. The next-generation CFD-code CODA [3], jointly developed by DLR, ONERA and Airbus, is based on modern software engineering, integrates advanced numerical algorithms and exploits current and future HPC architectures. For the integration and efficient interaction of disciplines to enable e.g. virtual flight testing, the FlowSimulator [4] is used as a platform jointly developed by several European partners. This talk gives an overview of the disciplinary and multi-disciplinary numerical methods and software solutions developed at the C²A²S²E department of the German Aerospace Center to address digital aircraft design and analysis.