The Engineering Sketch Pad (ESP): Supporting Design Through Analysis
Speaker: Bob Haimes, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Presentation
Abstract
Aerospace vehicle design can be described as an evolutionary process of gathering information to make informed decisions. Meticulous application of this process involves numerous simulations covering many disciplines and fidelity levels. A design team needs to be able to easily increase or decrease fidelity as they gather more information and learn about a particular design (and potentially change the design parameterization to better capture the mission). To this end a fully parametric geometry system that can support multi-disciplinary, multi- fidelity analysis from a single source is required. The Computational Aircraft Prototype Syntheses (CAPS), which is a part of the Engineering Sketch Pad (ESP), satisfies the above by combining proven computational geometry, best-in-class meshing, and analyses model generation techniques into a complete browser-based, client-server environment that is accessible to the entire design team of an aerospace vehicle. CAPS links analysis and meshing disciplines to any ESP geometry model via dynamically-loadable Analysis Interface Module (AIM) plugins. CAPS is accessed from a browser-based user interface, a Python interface and/or Multi- Disciplinary Analysis and Optimization (MDAO) framework through an API. This presentation describes the fundamental building blocks of ESP. The paradigm shift of creating multi-disciplinary geometry for multi-fidelity design is described.
Biography
Bob Haimes is a Principal Research Engineer in the Aerospace Computational Design Laboratory of the Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The major research focuses have been (1) scientific visualization for the results from CFD simulations, (2) parallel, distributed and High-Performance Computing, (3) applied computational geometry and (4) the use of geometry in conceptual through final design. Bob has had a number of projects in these areas funded by NASA, DoD, and industry. The research commonly has a component that produces software, which has a longer life and is more useful than the original investigation. The products Visual3 and pV3 (for CFD-style visualization) are still in use (even though they were introduced decades ago). CAPRI is an expression of the research in applied computation geometry, which has been commercialized. The Engineering Sketch Pad is the most recent foray into providing a consistent view of geometry throughout the multi-disciplinary, interdisciplinary and multi-fidelity design process. This work has an open-source license and freely available here.