Large-Scale Simulations of Aircraft Structures for Virtual Testing

摘要

Finite element simulations are increasingly employed by airframe manufacturers and their major component suppliers in order to carry out virtual testing of airframe and wing structures in advance of physical tests. The state-of-the-art for these large-scale simulations involves a combination of CAD and CAE software tools to construct the analysis models, followed by a combination of implicit and explicit finite element analysis solvers deployed on large parallel computer platforms. Model sizes are growing rapidly as the software architecture is developed to take advantage of the latest computer hardware. In this paper, we describe the latest advances in the construction and execution of these very largescale structural simulations.