A Collaborative Hypersonic Air-breathing Vehicle Design Environment

Proposed herein is a collaborative environment based on an object-oriented, web-enabled, multidisciplinary, distributed framework supporting the design and analysis of hypersonic air-breathing vehicles (CoHAVE). CoHAVE provides a customizable graphical user interface supporting a feature-based design environment integrating a suite of domain-specific analysis tools and geometry enabling the rapid prototyping of hypersonic air-breathing vehicles (HAVs). It supports a unified geometric part model, providing various levels of modeling fidelity to capture conceptual and preliminary design processes. CoHAVE links multiple users in a collaborative process, automating and managing data transfer and interaction among users, designs, analyses, and tools. It provides multidisciplinary optimization capabilities to enhance vehicle analysis, reducing engineering time and cost while expanding the design space explored. A common computational model seamlessly integrates geometry and analysis to support closure of the process through iterative control allowing forward and inverse design. CoHAVE is platform independent and enables multiple users to collaborate across geographically-distributed, heterogeneous workstations. CoHAVE provides a comprehensive environment that facilitates the performance of concurrent engineering of HAVs at a level not currently available.