ASiMoV

In 2018, a consortium led by Rolls-Royce and EPCC was awarded an EPSRC Prosperity Partnership worth £14.7m to develop the next generation of engineering simulation and modelling techniques. The aim was to develop the world’s first high-fidelity simulation of a complete gas-turbine engine during operation.

The five-year “Strategic Partnership in Computational Science for Advanced Simulation and Modelling of Virtual Systems (ASiMoV) embarked on an extremely challenging programme of research to enable this level of simulation that combines fundamental engineering and computational science research to address a challenge that is well beyond the capabilities of today’s state of the art.

The ultimate long-term goal of the research is to enable the “virtual certification” of aero engines, be they gas-turbine, hybrid or fully electric, by 2030. The journey to virtual certification requires a thorough evidential database to convince the certification authorities that the analysis can be trusted.

True virtual certification simulations will therefore require new high-resolution physical models and full system simulations that drive us from today’s model sizes (with 10-100 million cells) towards models with trillions of cells. This will result in a need for techniques that can exploit future computing platforms and the unprecedented amounts of data they consume and produce, robustly, securely and affordably.

This is a transformational change requiring a transformational collaboration, and EPCC is delighted to be leading the Partnership. In addition to Edinburgh, the Prosperity Partnership includes four Universities (Bristol, Cambridge, Oxford and Warwick) as well as two SMEs—CFMS and Zenotech.

Image courtesy Rolls-Royce.