Design Environment for Multi-Fidelity and Multi-Disciplinary Components

Many of the most challenging categories of propulsion system development are related to the prediction of interacting effects between the fluid loads, thermal loads, and the structural deflection. In practice, the interactions between technical disciplines are often not fully explored analytically, and the analysis in one discipline often uses a simplified representation of other disciplines as an input or boundary condition. For example, the fluid forces in an engine generate static and dynamic rotor deflection, but the forces themselves are dependent on the rotor position and its orbit. This practice ignores the interaction between the physical phenomena where the outcome of each analysis can be heavily dependent on the inputs (i.e., changes in flow due to deflection, changes in deflection due to fluid forces). Such a rigid design process also lacks the flexibility to employ multiple levels of fidelity in the analysis of each of the components. The goals for this project are to develop and validate an innovative design environment that has the flexibility to simultaneously analyze multiple disciplines, multiple components, with multiple levels of model fidelity. Development and demonstration of such a system will provide substantially superior capabilities to current design tools. More »