The CREATE-AV project is tasked to develop, deploy, and support a set of multi-disciplinary, physics-based simulation software products for the engineering workforces, supporting air vehicle acquisition programs of the services. These products are designed to exploit the capabilities of next-generation computational resources to decrease the acquisition lifecycle costs of air vehicles and support a paradigm shift to a reliance on virtual testing instead of physical testing as the primary source of decision data.
The importance of physical tests is not diminished in any way, but rather the resources are focused on validating the digital model and performance in key areas of the flight envelope. Streamlined engineering workflows and computational physics models enable the detection of design flaws and performance anomalies early in aircraft development by both government and industry professionals.
The CREATE-AV software suite includes Kestrel (fixed-wing), Helios (rotary wing), and ADAPT (conceptual design) and supports multiple key DoD initiatives including digital engineering transformation, hypersonic vehicle development and defense, aircraft modernization, and workforce development.
Â
Kestrel is the fixed-wing high-fidelity simulation tool of the CREATE Air Vehicles project (CREATE-AV). It enables coupled multi-fidelity simulations that combine aerodynamics, thermochemisty, structural dynamics, thermodynamics, propulsion, and flight controls. Kestrel supports a variety of fixed-wing across flow regimes ranging from incompressible to hypersonic speeds and can model weapons separation such as store launches. Kestrel includes a user interface to intuitively build complex simulations and includes functionality to model unsteady aerodynamics over long time periods, such as high-fidelity trajectory simulations. It also includes a Software Development Kit (SDK) to facilitate user-supplied plug-ins that may be needed by particular DoD programs.
Â
Helios is the rotary-wing multi-fidelity simulation tool of the CREATE-AV project. Like Kestrel, it performs multi-physics computational analysis of rotorcraft aeromechanics, coupling aerodynamics, structures, and propulsion of rotorcraft platforms. Helios is uniquely suited to model hover and forward flight performance for vertical lift air vehicles used by Army, Navy, and Air Force. Rotor wakes are resolved using a unique dual mesh paradigm, which applies structured or unstructured body-fitted meshes near the vehicle surface and adaptively refined high-order Cartesian meshes in the farfield. Helios includes an intuitive user interface for the setup of complex vehicles, and includes a mid-fidelity Cartesian-based option for quick turnaround. It supports both Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) as well as traditional CPU HPC architectures and, like Kestrel, provides a SDK to facilitate user-supplied plug-ins.
Â
ADAPT (Aircraft Design, Analysis, Performance, and Trade-space) is CREATE-AV's aircraft conceptual design framework. ADAPT allows aircraft designers to easily integrate and use multi-disciplinary tools in a common framework, explore the aircraft design trade-space, and leverage HPC resources at the conceptual design stage.
ADAPT is comprised of three major pieces: (1) the extensible ADAPT data structure, which provides the common framework for integrating multi-disciplinary tools, (2) the ADAPT GUI, which enables conceptual designers to easily set inputs, document work, and analyze results, and (3) the ADAPT execution engine, which runs the integrated multi-disciplinary toolset on desktop or HPC machines.