Projects

Due to its need for numerous large scale and routine rapid simulations, the aerospace industry has emerged as one of the most consistent markets and drivers for HPC.

 

Business and research institutions in this industry require advanced computational tools in order to be more productive, competitive and profitable. HPC enables them to design, develop and test lighter, more efficient and safer aircraft and related components. Improving aircraft fuel efficiency and flight (cruise, take-off, landing) dynamics requires 3D flow problems and complex flow physics which can only be solved with aerodynamic test facilities and numerical flow simulations with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) applications.

While wind tunnels are very expensive to build and maintain, computational fluid dynamics technologies permit engineers to simulate fluid phenomena in ever increasing detail and may one day eliminate the need for wind tunnel test altogether. Structural mechanics analysis of airplane structures, landing gear and other components enables detection design flaws and designing superior quality components. Leveraging HPC, they can model and simulate new engine designs with the need to physically build and test them.

The decreasing cost of large computational power has enabled the use of increasingly more sophisticated models in simulations. This has resulted in simulations which not only generate results closer to experiments, but even generate more information than attainable through experimentation.