Over the next 25 to 40 years, the U.S. Army plans to replace its entire fleet of vertical lift helicopters, a project costing billions of taxpayer dollars. For the first time, HPC modeling was decisive in reducing the number of hopeful competing vendors – AVX Aircraft, Bell Helicopter, Karem Aircraft, and Sikorsky/Boeing – from four to two.
All submitted designs. “None of these had ever been flown or tested before. [We received] these paper designs about a year ago, and had two months to develop meshes, to do the calculations, and turn around some analysis of these four configurations,” explained Roger Strawn, of the U.S. Research, Development and Engineering Command.
“The big news for me and for our lab was that those CFD analyses had a big role in the down-select from 4 to 2 and Bell and Sikorsky are now going forward [in the program]. That’s the first time that HPC has really ever been used in a real acquisition program,” said Strawn, speaking at the HPC User Forum held earlier this month in Norfolk, Va. The work was actually completed last year.
The Army, said Strawn, has many more helicopters than the Air Force has airplanes and the helicopters are actually more expensive. “[DoD] is all about risk reduction these days and one of the areas is high performance computing modeling and simulation to make sure there are no surprises in these rotorcraft,” said Strawn.
Strawn’s presentation examined some of the Army’s HPC modeling and simulation plans: “I will tell you today about how we [became] able to do this type of modeling and simulation, where we are right now, and where we are headed in terms of the future role of high performance computing.”
The full video, shown below, is roughly 26 minutes:
Image of Future Vertical Lift design courtesy Boeing-Sikorsky Graphics.