This presentation was made at NAFEMS Americas 2018 Seminar, "Aerospace Simulation Engineering - Navigating the Digital Thread".

Aerospace manufacturers and suppliers are facing an increasingly challenging and competitive marketplace as their products are becoming more complex via tighter integration of systems and cyber-physical environments. That being said, there are rising interests to incorporate Digital Threads as communication frameworks for sharing product lifecycle information seamlessly and Digital Twin methodologies for assessing virtually the expected and future operational physics-based capabilities of a product throughout its lifecycle. Utilizing these techniques in conjunction with the latest engineering simulation tools effectively, accurately and efficiently to meet business goals has never been more critical, as aerospace engineering continues to move into a highly-advanced technological space.

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to investigate the applicability of Adjoint optimization combined with mesh morphing to the industrial practice, by the integration of commonly used commercial simulation software.

Adjoint techniques are efficient optimization methods in terms of accuracy of results and short computational cost, but normally are limited to in-house simulation codes, that allow the calculation of partial derivatives of the observable quantities within the model simulation. Commercial software such as ANSYS Fluent make available derivatives in function of mesh points, and combined with a mesh morphing tool as RBF Morph, derivatives can be automatically computed in function of design parameters, such as the amplifications of RBF solutions that control the shape of the mesh.

Integrating these software in the optimization platform modeFRONTIER from ESTECO, it becomes possible to apply efficient gradient based optimization algorithms, with the big advantage of a full automatic process integration, and a very short number of design simulations to optimize the objective function. Methodology details and CFD application benchmarks will be illustrated