Role of HPC in Aircraft Design

Abstract

In recent years, the aeronautical industriy has established numerical flow simulations as a key element in the aerodynamic design process, complementing wind tunnel and flight tests. The continuous development of physical models and numerical methods and the availability of increasingly powerful computers suggest using numerical simulations to a much greater extent than before, radically chaning the way aircraft will be designed in the future. The vision of an aircraft performing its "maiden flight" in a virtual computer environment is the focus of future research in numerical simulation in aeronautics. One of the primary objectives is the development and deployment of a flexible, parallel software platform for multidisciplinary analysis and optimization of aircraft based on high-fidelity numerical methods for each discipline involved. This platform should break up the predominantly sequential approach currently used in detail design and should make available the full potential of multidisciplinary design. The multidisciplinary simulation platform should also make it possible to efficiently and reliably perform manoeuvre simulations throughout the entire flight envelope, and thus permit the determination of aerodynamic and aeroelastic data for evaluating the handling qualities based on high-fidelity numerical methods. The very complex, multidisciplinary simulations and the challenges in terms of physical modeling across the flight envelope require enormous HPC resources and further developments and improvements of flow solvers (CFD). Given the technology development of high-performance computers, most CFD solvers used today have reached the limit of scalability when it comes to parallelization. Therefore, design and implementation of a next-generation flow solver taking advantage of the upcoming computer architecture is to be regarded as a future investment of aeronautical research and industry. The presentation will describe some of the target applications for virtual analysis and testing in aircraft design. Based on the current status of the CFD methods the major challenges and requirements for further development will be derived.