Enabling the environmentally clean air transportation of the future: a vision of computational fluid dynamics in 2030

Abstract

As global air travel expands rapidly to meet demand generated by economic growth, it is essential to continue to improve the efficiency of air transportation to reduce its carbon emissions and address concerns about climate change. Future transports must be ‘cleaner’ and designed to include technologies that will continue to lower engine emissions and reduce community noise. The use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) will be critical to enable the design of these new concepts. In general, the ability to simulate aerodynamic and reactive flows using CFD has progressed rapidly during the past several decades and has fundamentally changed the aerospace design process. Advanced simulation capabilities not only enable reductions in ground-based and flight-testing requirements, but also provide added physical insight, and enable superior designs at reduced cost and risk. In spite of considerable success, reliable use of CFD has remained confined to a small region of the operating envelope due, in part, to the inability of current methods to reliably predict turbulent, separated flows. Fortunately, the advent of much more powerful computing platforms provides an opportunity to overcome a number of these challenges. This paper summarizes the findings and recommendations from a recent NASA-funded study that provides a vision for CFD in the year 2030, including an assessment of critical technology gaps and needed development, and identifies the key CFD technology advancements that will enable the design and development of much cleaner aircraft in the future.

Aerodynamics, computers and the environment

“…However, for the flows found in airframes, the Reynolds numbers are substantially higher, creating a challenge of a massively different scale. This aspect is outlined by Slotnick et al [10].…”

Fast Multi-objective Optimisation of a Micro-fluidic Device by Using Graphics Accelerators

“…Employing alternative GPU computational architectures for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)-based applications can also be an intermediate step towards the next generation of HPC and computational methods [11]. There are several applications where GPUs have been proven useful in accelerating the execution of sub-system(s) for the purposes of aviation, such as [14] and many more are expected in the future.…”

“…It has enabled users to design, to analyse and to support high-performing and cost-efficient commercial transports, and it has contributed to changing the process of aerodynamic design as an accompanying tool to experimental and operational processes. Moreover, it is foreseen that using CFD will contribute critically to developing a more environmentally-friendly technology in the next few years [11]. The ability to simulate (both aerodynamic and reactive) flows by using CFD has progressed considerably and changed the aerospace design process, while reducing testing requirements and physical designs at lower cost and risk.…”

“…CUDA provides the flexibility required to directly and easily manipulate various levels and types of finely grained computational resources on GPUs. Due to the low overall cost and high computational efficiency, GPUs now offer a decent alternative computational architecture that can sufficiently cope with the requirements of scientific applications, which increasingly require even more computational power [9][10][11]. Computationally, GPUs also have great cost benefit: their low energy consumption for the attained computational speed inspired the creation of the performance metric proposed by Bekas and Curioni in [12], called f(time to solution) energy (FTTSE), where the elapsed time is combined with the energy required for performing a simulation.…”

Aerodynamic Investigation of Datum and Slotted Blade Profiles under Different Mach Number Conditions

“…Air transport will contribute 1.5 billion tonnes of CO 2 emissions annually by 2025 [1]. Hence, it is critical to study aerodynamics with the view to creating more energy-efficient aero-engine.…”