EXAMPLE · Exact and Adaptive Modeling and Simulation of the Air Passage of Aircraft Engines

The interaction between the processes of design and analysis of mechanical components is at the core of industrial engineering. In particular in the very specialized and competitive field of designing highly-efficient aircraft engines, a large number of optimization loops is required to fully exploit the entire potential of efficiency with respect to various mechanical, aerodynamic and thermal objectives. On the one hand, the design process is performed with the help of suitable software tools, which represent the field of Computer Aided Design (CAD). In aircraft engine design, a combination of commercial products with highly specialized in-house software tools is used. On the other hand, the analysis process relies on software from the field of Computer Aided Engineering (CAE). The interaction of these tools, which is needed for optimizing the engineering design with respect to various criteria, is not very well supported by the currently used mathematical technology for geometric design and numerical simulation. The main objective of the EXAMPLE project is as follows:Improve the design and analysis processes for the air passage of aircraft engines by enhancing the existing mathematical technology using the new approach of Isogeometric Analysis (IGA) which was proposed by T.J.R Hughes et al. in 2005.This objective will be achieved by combing expertise of the academic partner on IGA, which was acquired during a previous European project on IGA, with the experience on design and analysis of aircraft engines which is available at the industrial partner. The two main workpackages in EXAMPLE will address the following two topics: (1) Volumetric Air Passage Modeling and Applications, in particular techniques for creating spline volume parameterizations of the air passage. (2) Adaptive Trivariate Spline Technology.