INCITE Roundup: Boeing, Pratt & Whitney

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Curious about what some of the 7 companies who got grants of DOE supercomputing time are going to do with it? Me too. Here’s what DefenseNews had to say about what Boeing and jet engine maker Pratt & Whitney are doing with the time.

Michael Garrett, Boeing Commercial Airplanes’ director of airplane performance, said their 200,000 hour allocation will be used for the

…“development, correlations and validations of large-scale computational tools for flight vehicles,” and will involve computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to study the effects of various payloads on aircraft wings.

These results not only cut production time and wind-tunnel testing — Garrett noted that similar simulation advances led to Boeing building and testing 11 different wing designs for its new 787 Dreamliner versus 77 for the older 767 aircraft — but also mean lower costs for aircraft production. All of these can be applied to fighter jet production, he said.

Boeing will also use the time to test how jet engines react when a fan blade is lost. Pratt & Whitney will use the time to simulate the impact of properly resolving turbulence on combustor swirler aerodynamics.