BSC researchers working towards cleaner European Aviation

07 June 2022

Spirits were high as researchers from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center- Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) participated in the Horizon Europe, RIA-funded, CAELESTIS project kick-off meeting on 9-10 May 2022. This project, which counts with the support of the European programme’s European Climate Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA), seeks to develop a novel and secure end-to-end Interoperable Simulation Ecosystem (ISE) to usher in a cleaner period of European Aviation.

It is expected that emissions from aviation in the EU will increase by 50% by 2050 compared to 2019. As a driver of climate neutrality goals, and to respond to this challenge, the EU is leading the way to find solutions that will slow this increase by supporting industry solutions. Beyond contributing to Europe’s 2050 climate goals, the CAELESTIS project will contribute to the competitivity of the EU aeronautics industry and will offer tool suppliers with the opportunity to expand existing and new tools.

Under the coordination of AIMEN Centro Tecnológico, and with representatives from 11 partners from 7 EU member states (Austria, Cyprus, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden), the CAELESTIS Project will work over 42 months to develop an ISE that will perform multidirectional dataflow across the aircraft value chain linking product design and distributed engineering tools to accelerate the design and engineering optimization of aircraft and engine configurations, ensuring their manufacturability from the design conceptualization. This ISE will enable the EU aircraft industry to design and manufacture disruptive aircraft structures and engines with enhanced prediction capacities, to widen the design space and reduce the uncertainties potentially encountered along the product and engineering lifecycle, which are currently limiting their introduction into service.

Jorge Ejarque, senior research engineer, and the BSC’s PI for this project, along with groups from Computer Sciences and Computer Applications in Science & Engineering (CASE) will, among other contributions, lead the way in the design and development of a digital ecosystem to enable the flexible integration of product and process simulation tools and industry-driven product and process optimization services on demand at HPC. HPC infrastructures, specifically COMPSs and Alya technologies, will play an integral role in this project through their execution of massive calculations, predictions, and simulation workflows and their ability to deliver optimized design and engineering outputs at realistic time-scales.

About the CAELESTIS project

CAELESTIS (Hyperconnected simulation ecosystem supporting probabilistic design and predictive manufacturing of next generation aircraft structures) is a European-funded project with a budget of 5.9M Euro that started on 1 May 2022 and will last for 42 months. Coordinated by AIMEN Centro Tecnológico (AIM) (ES), the project brings together a multidisciplinary consortium: BSC (ES), Universitat de Girona (ES), Addcomposites Oy (FI), ESI Group (FR), ESI Software Germany GMBH (DE), Insitut de Recherche Technologique Jules Verne (FR), Instituto Technlólgico de Aragon (ES), Technische Universiteit Delft (NL), Ebos Technologies limited (CY), GKN Aerospace Sweden AB (SE), RTDS- Verein Zur Forderung der Kommnikation und Vermittlung von Forschung, Technologie und Innovation (AT). The CAELESTIS project has received funding under grant agreement no. 1010568.