HPCMP CREATE(TM)- AV Multiphysics Simulation Tools for Digital Transformation of Air Vehicle Acquisitions

McDaniel, David (DoD HPCMP CREATE(TM) / Univ of Alabama Birmingham)

Category:
Intersection of Digital Engineering and High Performance Computing/High End Computing

For over a decade now, the Computational Research and Engineering Acquisition Tools and Environments (CREATE) program in HPCMP has been developing high-fidelity multiphysics software tools in the air, land, and sea domains to accelerate product innovation in DoD acquisition programs through the use of computational prototypes and high-end computing. Over 13 years of feature-rich product releases have been delivered to government, industry, and academic stakeholders across the DoD acquisition community, positively impacting numerous weapons programs across the Army, Navy, and Air Force.

The suite of products from the CREATE-Air Vehicles (AV) project element includes the well known fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft simulation tools, Kestrel and Helios, respectively. There are currently over 1100 active licenses for these products across numerous DoD organizations as well as all major airframe manufacturers. The ability to couple high-fidelity aerodynamics simulations with varying levels of propulsion modeling, elastic structures, rigid-body kinematics, and other physics models in a high-performance computing environment has proven to be a key enabler to address critical problems of interest across all phases of DoD air vehicle acquisitions. Both products have become the primary high-fidelity analysis tool of choice in multiple DoD and industry organizations, having proven over the years to be robust and resilient tools with timely support from an excellent quality assurance team. In addition to Kestrel and Helios, the AV multidisciplinary design and optimization tool, ADAPT (Aircraft Design Analysis Performance and Tradespace), is now in its fourth year of development and reaching operational capability with most of its initial stakeholders.

This presentation will provide a brief review of each of the CREATE-AV products as well as a summary of the key new capabilities in the current releases and associated example applications. Then, the presentation will highlight existing capabilities and ongoing development activities targeting digital transformation concepts (i.e. features and workflows to make CREATE-AV tools coupled with high-end computing resources more relevant and impactful to the DoD acquisition community). This discussion will touch on topics such as the integration of AV tools with other CREATE products, variable-fidelity and surrogate modeling, and uncertainty quantification and sensitivity studies.