Overview
Due to strong competitiveness and considerable increase of technological demand in terms of performance and reliability of constituting components, aircraft manufacturers are constantly urged to invest in innovative design technologies so as to reduce aircraft development costs and delivery time. Moreover, manufacturing restrictive quality constraints and the limits imposed to industrial budget require aircraft design to be cheaper and more effective at the same time.
To this end, to reduce the aerodynamic design process as well as satisfy the ever-growing demand of the aeronautical optimisation, a significant enhancement of the CFD prediction capability is required. Moreover, to face with the requirements of top-level aeronautical design, the geometries optimiser is requested to fulfil process integration, multi-objective and multi-disciplinary strategy, mesh-independent solution, parallelism, large models and arbitrary mesh element type management.
The RBF4AERO project is properly conceived to tackle all the above-indicated aspects by making the CFD model parametric through an innovative shape optimisation tool based on a high-performance meshless morphing technique. This technique is founded on Radial Basis Functions (RBF) theoretical approach which offers a number of distinct advantages over the more traditional optimisation approaches. This new optimisation methodology will guarantee very fast and highly detailed CFD optimisation analyses such to significantly reduce costs of optimisation of aircraft aerodynamics without losing accuracy or domain extent.