NAFEMS Americas and Digital Engineering (DE) teamed up (once again) to present CAASE, the (now Virtual) Conference on Advancing Analysis & Simulation in Engineering, on June 16-18, 2020!

CAASE20 brought together the leading visionaries, developers, and practitioners of CAE-related technologies in an open forum, unlike any other, to share experiences, discuss relevant trends, discover common themes, and explore future issues, including:
-What is the future for engineering analysis and simulation?
-Where will it lead us in the next decade?
-How can designers and engineers realize its full potential?
What are the business, technological, and human enablers that will take past successful developments to new levels in the next ten years?

Resource Abstract

Engineers across many industries rely upon modeling and simulation (M&S) to develop new products, make decisions, and optimize designs. The introduction of initiatives, such as the Department of Defense (DoD) Digital Engineering Strategy, further highlights the fact that M&S activities are becoming more prominent in engineering applications. Applying M&S in engineering activities has the well-established business and technical benefits of reducing development costs, exploring broad design spaces, and demonstrating technologies. For M&S to successfully yield the proclaimed benefits, engineers conducting the M&S must be able to prove that the results are credible and trustworthy. However, methodologies for promoting credibility and trust, usually contained within verification and validation (V&V) activities, are commonly not well developed, nor well implemented in engineering practices. This makes the problem of determining how much to trust M&S challenging in almost any setting, but it becomes even more formidable for industries with products that have strict budget and schedule constraints, high levels of complexity, or rigorous performance requirements. As an example, the aerospace industry produces many systems that have high-consequences of failure, experience complex physical interactions, and compete for narrow increments of improvement in performance.

Rolls-Royce is an organization in the aerospace industry that has recently partnered with Purdue University to implement a well-documented V&V framework for a centrifugal compressor modeling project with the intent of addressing the issue of trust in M&S. This presentation will discuss observations from implementing a new, rigorous V&V framework and will evaluate the effectiveness of the V&V framework in establishing trust in model predictions. The key observations and results will come from the following steps of the V&V framework:

• Specifying accuracy requirements, application domain, validation domain, system response quantities of interest, and uncertainties

• Performing phenomena identification and ranking table (PIRT) and gap analysis activities

• Acquiring code verification documentation

• Acquiring experimental data and measurement uncertainties

• Performing solution verification

• Propagating uncertainties through the model

• Estimating prediction error

• Assessing model adequacy

While the discussion will speak in general terms about the qualities of the V&V framework and the process of implementing it, the presentation will provide complementary results from the centrifugal compressor modeling project. This application capitalizes on the fact that the centrifugal compressor modeling project was an ongoing effort at Rolls-Royce before implementing the new V&V framework, which allows for a direct comparison between the V&V framework and the traditional process. In general, this work confirms many anticipated advantages of implementing the V&V framework. Examples include promoting greater confidence in model development through structured activities and improving decision making capability through quantification of uncertainties. The work also identifies several shortcomings of the framework in the form of difficulties to acquire certain information within large organizations or projects, unfamiliarity of engineers with concepts of uncertainty or framework activities, lack of clear termination points for some framework steps, and challenges to accurately compare time and cost commitments.