Industry joins forces to revolutionise aerodynamic design

Citation

(2008), "Industry joins forces to revolutionise aerodynamic design", Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, Vol. 80 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/aeat.2008.12780aaf.013

Industry joins forces to revolutionise aerodynamic design

Industry joins forces to revolutionise aerodynamic design

Experts from across industry have joined forces to vastly improve the design processes of aerodynamic structures.

The Department for Trade and Industry assisted initiative, known as the CFMS Core Programme, is the largest of its kind in the world, and aims to drastically reduce the time between an initial design idea and the finished product.

The programme will initially focus on reducing the cost of introducing new civil and military equipment. It will also improve speed and accuracy in predicting the performance of in- service modifications to existing aircraft.

The partners, which include BAE Systems^* and Airbus, plan to make use of off-the-shelf commodity computing hardware to enhance designs. By changing algorithms and making better use of emerging design programme hardware, the initiative will provide a more accessible alternative to expensive computing technology. This will improve design processes leading to cleaner, greener passenger aircraft and speeding the design of ships, buildings, cars, high performance sports equipment and more effective renewable energy products.

The demand for more efficient technology is ever increasing and engineers need to be able to test different aerodynamic designs quickly. The CFMS Core Programme will allow designers and developers to test a variety of designs to determine the most effective solution quickly and cheaply.

The programme uses numerical methods to investigate the flow of gases and liquids around complex surfaces. Currently, computational fluid dynamics can only provide approximate solutions in most cases, and is usually followed by expensive and time-consuming tests to validate the calculations. Experts predict this initiative will improve the power of simulation-based design by up to one million times by 2012.

David Standingford, BAE Systems' Technical Programme Manager on the CFMS Core Programme said: “This initiative allows cross-sector industries to share their expertise to help improve the design and efficiency of a multitude of products. Lightweight flexible structures of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) present major design challenges; an early programme will examine how the key elements in these systems interact.”

^* The CFMS Core Programme Consortium comprises Airbus, Aircraft Research Association, BAE Systems, BMT Fluids, Eurostep, Frazer-Nash Consultancy, MBDA, Microsoft, PCA Engineers, Quadrics, QinetiQ, Rolls- Royce, Westland Helicopters and Williams F1. Matched funding for the Core Programme is provided by the DTI.