Ed Wettlaufer, Technical Manager Mechatronics Group, Altair [on behalf of NAVAIR]
Government solicitations for proposals, or RFPs, for aircraft and airborne systems require preliminary designs with enough fidelity to accurately predict performance, in order to prove the design's ability to meet the Governments performance requirements. Modern high-performance computing provides the leverage to execute previously expensive analyses in areas such as computational fluid dynamics. The results of these high order analyses can be used to populate parameters in 1D systems models which can be easily coupled to medium order models from other disciplines. These capabilities allow the design engineer to rapidly iterate to levels of model maturity and accuracy not achievable years ago, resulting in high levels of confidence in the designs performance predictions in unprecedented time.
Moving forward, Altair engineers will employ Multiphysics and co-simulation to execute the Engineering and Manufacturing Development phase (EMD) for one subsystem of the preliminary design developed in the afore mentioned pre-acquisition phase.