Altair Engineering, which specialises in advanced engineering software and product design, has been selected by Airbus as a product development partner in aircraft design. Airbus will make use of Altair’s experience in simulation and optimising structural design.
Altair and its product development division, Altair ProductDesign, are longstanding collaborators with Airbus, and have established an Altair Optimisation Centre at Airbus France in Toulouse. The centre takes an initial aircraft design and optimises it to deliver structural design options that minimize component or major assembly mass while maintaining performance requirements.
Altair also assists in the development of optimisation tools, such as OptiStruct, to create specific functionality for Airbus projects. As well as metallic components, the Optimisation Centre is involved in the design of structures made from light-weight composite material.
Altair ProductDesign is also a primary partner with the Airbus Non-linear Technical Centre for large-scale modelling and is currently engaged on the predictive simulation of large aircraft system models in a virtual environment. This is the first time that Airbus has performed these tests at an aircraft level, stretching the limit of existing software to be able to simulate such detailed and complete models. The major challenge is to perform this detailed modelling to anticipate local issues in the aircraft.
