The core objective of Fortissimo 2 was to promote the uptake of advanced modelling, simulation and data analytics services by European small and medium enterprises in the manufacturing sector. The project built on the Fortissimo project and further developed the Fortissimo marketplace, focusing on application experiments that involve the modelling and simulation of coupled physical processes or high performance data analytics.

The proposed application experiment - Cross-Solver Cloud-based Tool for Aeronautical FSI Applications - aimed at solving a wide of real world aeronautical aero-elastic optimizations in a reliable and cost-efficient way by means of the RBF4AERO software Platform running as a cloud – based tool on the high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure of Fortissimo.

For an aircraft production cycle, the ability to reduce production costs decreases rapidly during the first phases of the project. In fact, 80% of the development cost and 70% of the life cycle cost of a product are determined during its conceptual design phase. Considering this, the need to reduce the research and development (R&D) investigation time is significant. Consequently, powerful design tools are essential to shorten the time to acquire physical knowledge about the aircraft components and so to reduce production costs.

The RBF4AERO platform is a toolbox which tackles all the aspects related to aircraft numerical design and optimization. It does this by making the CFD model parametric through an innovative shape optimization tool based on a high-performance meshless morphing technique.The experiment performed the successful adaptation of the RBF4AERO platform to work on cloud-based HPC. This adaptation was applied to the optimization of a component of a real aircraft using computational models relevant to the aeronautical sector. The Consortium benefitted from the technical collaboration with Piaggio Aerospace, an important worldwide stakeholder in the design and manufacturing of mid-size business aircraft. Piaggio Aerospace provided the models to set-up the optimization of the shape of the Piaggio P180 Avanti EVO vehicle.

Improving aircraft performance has a clear economic value. In this experiment the RBF4AERO platform was used on an industrial case demonstrating its capability to solve a wide range of real world aeronautical aero-elastic optimizations in a reliable and cost-efficient manner. This achievemen was realised through the generation of a computational mesh aligned with the requirements dictated by a worldwide mid-size business jets stakeholder, the generation of consistent shape modifications of industrial significance and the demonstration of the feasibility of a fully coupled fluid-structure interaction computation with CAE models characterised by non-matching external surfaces.

Fortissimo Experiment Partners:

• RINA Consulting (End User)
• UTV & NTUA (Application Expert)
• CNR (HPC & Application Expert)
• CINECA (HPC Provider)