Following up my previous post from Farnborough, I would like to further the focus on the passenger experience as an important trend of the future of the Aerospace industry. Now think about it: what could you experience with anything that is static? Not much, really. Any experience in real life involves interaction, and feedback on how your surroundings BEHAVE with respect to your interaction.

Well, it goes the same when it comes to virtual universes. A couple decades ago, a 3D Digital-Mockup (3D DMU) was fine to see how the whole product (say an aircraft in that case) would look like, yet that was pretty much static. Of course, virtual simulation (especially materials resistance) could be performed as well, but the processes were not really tied together. In order to get a holistic understanding of the behavior of an aircraft, you need to be able to design and simulate at the same time.

This combination is exactly the scope of a large European project, called “Collaborative & Robust Engineering using Simulation Capability Enabling Next Design Optimisation” aka CRESCENDO (now THAT’s what I call an acronym 😮 ). The project, coordinated by Airbus, gathers 59 partners (companies, research centers, universities — see the full list below) accross 13 countries to develop what Behavioural Digital Aircraft (BDA).

BDA focuses in particular on the following use cases:

• Thermal Aircraft addresses the challenges of increasingly hotter equipments (e.g. electronics equipements, hot air exhausts), from the simulation of those equipments up to the global thermal trade-offs at the whole aircraft level
• Powerplant Integration is a multi-disciplinary approach of the thermal and structural challenges of the propulsion engines
• Energy Aircraft is about energy systems engineering from the preliminary tests up to final certification

If you’re interested in knowing more about CRESCENDO, check this out.

Many thanks to Delphine Zinck, A&D Industry Solution Experience Specialist, who let me know about this on-going project! 🙂