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. A typical design practice might involve predicting the fluid and thermal loads for various conditions and passing those estimates along for inclusion with the structural model. 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. In this project, Mechanical Solutions, Inc. (MSI) proposes to extend two existing software tools to develop a design environment with both breadth (to cover multiple disciplines) and depth (to cover multiple levels of fidelity).