Toolkit to Produce Common Adaptive Mesh for Virtual Reality-based Multidisciplinary Interactive Design of Naval Aircraft

The NAVY seeks to develop an innovative tool that can autonomously generate a common mesh from Computer-Aided Design (CAD) geometry with adaptive global and local refinement capabilities for coupled aero-thermal-structural analysis and optimization to enable Virtual Reality (VR)-based real-time interactive designs. Extensive research has been done in digital engineering for aircraft development to accelerate the multidisciplinary design, analysis, and optimization. Despite the relatively extensive research in this field, there are several challenges posed by the increased geometrical accuracy requirements and physical complexities in mesh generation for multi-physics simulations involving the interplay between high-speed aerodynamics, structural dynamics, and thermodynamics. The lack of autonomous and geometry-aware mesh generation techniques and the difficulty in automatic mesh adaption with local and global refinements without prior knowledge of the problem have been identified as significant bottlenecks in the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) workflow. To address these challenges, Global Engineering and Materials, Inc. (GEM) and collaborators propose to develop an effective and innovative octree-based adaptive meshing tool to perform efficient multi-physics simulations for aircraft applications. The toolkit can autonomously generate a common mesh from a CAD geometry with adaptive global and local refinement capabilities for coupled aero-thermal-structural analysis and optimization which enables Virtual Reality (VR)-based real-time interactive designs. The novelties and key components of the proposed approach include: 1) an efficient octree-based adaptive meshing technique for fluid and solid domains; 2) high-quality common mesh generation around complex CAD models with no human intervention; 3) efficient local/global meshing to capture relevant physics in critical regions; 4) efficient immersed numerical simulation to perform compressible-flow analysis on non-body-fitted meshes; 5) isogeometric analysis based 3D solid, 2D shell and 1D beam modeling; 6) geometry- and solution-aware adaptive refinement and coarsening; 7) massively parallel and scalable algorithms; 8) a hybrid IMGA/BF (immersogeometric/boundary-fitted) and overlapping mesh approach to handle both body-fitted and non-body-fitted meshes; and 9) an efficient multidisciplinary design, analysis and optimization (MDAO) approach. The key components are geared towards creating a more robust, versatile, and intuitive tool for tackling the complex demands of modern aerospace engineering and simulations.