SIMOPAIR

SIMOPAIR focuses on innovative aerodynamic design capabilities for new aerodynamic shapes and flight physics, the upstream research activities of SIMOPAIR address also the following key objectives:

• Pioneering the air transport of the future by coming up with fully new aircraft design concepts that achieve the best compromise between energy efficiency and emission without sacrifice safety. These innovative aircraft design concepts take into account multiple objectives and multi-disciplinary considerations that will lead to a significant decrease in emission such as CO2 and NOx (in accordance to guidelines stated at the ACARE 2020 and 2050 flight paths).
• Improving industrial design processes, through the development of a powerful and computationally efficient aircraft design tools, driven by global search algorithms and enhanced by a number of complementary techniques, in particular local search methods, surrogate modelling, multi-fidelity simulations and adaptive and multi-level shape representations, thereby shortening the time-to-market for novel aircraft concepts.

From a national point of view, SIMOPAIR is directly aligned to the Challenge “Sustainable, smart and integrated transport” and, more specifically, sustainable and efficient aviation, in the sense that SIMOPAIR outputs will clearly contribute to the design of the next generation of greener and more efficient aircraft. In addition, these objectives are of high interest for the national aeronautic industry, and in particular for AIRBUS and AIRBUS-Military. The project will provide industry with novel methodologies and tools for shape design optimization, and it will therefore contribute to improve the competitiveness of these national industries in a world context and, moreover, generate new high-skilled job positions in Spain. For all the points previously mentioned, we strongly believe this project is completely in accordance to the Spanish Research Strategy for the period 2017-2020, and we aim to establish a national research team (composed by the School of Aeronautics of Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and the National Research Center for Aerospace Technology) focused on industrial needs.

Specific objectives:

The specific objectives of SIMOPAIR are designed to advance the state-of-the-art in aircraft aerodynamic design:

1. Detailed numerical simulation using high-order schemes of complex aircraft flows.  A minimum of two configurations of aeronautical interest and currently under research by Airbus will be agreed.
2. Development of new methodology for data analysis, data compressing techniques, adjoint and sensitivity methods able to analyse complex and unsteady flow solutions.
3. Data analysis techniques will be used to develop advanced surrogate models and novel management strategies by using modern learning algorithms such as semi-supervised learning and active learning.
4. Adaptive and multi-level parameterization of the shapes, in particular CAD-based shape representation will be adopted. This solution is essential for enabling global exploration and local refinement.
5. Multi-objective optimization, which involves different targets, will be explored interactively to identify the best design by considering trade-offs between different objectives.
6. Global search meta-heuristics, such as evolutionary algorithms and particle swarm optimization will be employed as the main search algorithms, assisted by surrogate models and adjoint methods. They have proved to be extremely powerful in explorative search of optimal solutions yet have not been adopted in aeronautical industry.

CONVOCATORIA 2018 DE PROYECTOS I+D+i «RETOS INVESTIGACIÓN»
DEL PROGRAMA ESTATAL DE I+D+i ORIENTADA A LOS RETOS DE LA SOCIEDAD

Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación. Agencia Estatal de Investigación.
REFERENCIA: RTI2018-097075-B-I00
TITULO: SIMOPAIR: SIMULACIONES DE ALTA PRECISION Y MODELIZACION PARA DISEÑO OPTIMO AERONAUTICO