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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations
European Initiatives
FP7 & H2020 Projects
EU research projects were and will be a privileged instrument of diffusion and transfer of our results. The AEROGUST H2020 project involves aeronautical industry (Airbus, Dassault, Piaggio..) and research labs (University of Bristol, DLR, NLR, University of Cape Town) and is dedicated to modeling of aerodynamic gust response for applications. We take part in this project by developing simulation models for unsteady aeroelastic problems and data-driven reduced-order models. We played a similar role for the past in the FP7 project FFAST with the same partners.
AEROGUST
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Encounters with atmospheric turbulence are a vitally important in the design and certification of many manmade structures such as aircraft and wind turbines. Gusts cause rapid changes in the flow about the structures which leads to rigid and flexible unsteady responses. Knowledge of aircraft/gust interactions is therefore vital for loads estimation during aircraft design as it impacts on control systems and often defines the maximum loads that these structures will experience in service. At present industry typically uses the linear doublet lattice method with static loads corrections from expensive wind tunnel data. The wind tunnel data is created using the final aerodynamic surface in the predicted cruise shape. This means that gust loads come relatively late when the design options have been narrowed. Increased competition and environmental concerns are likely to lead to the adoption of more flexible materials and the consideration of novel configurations, in which case the linear assumptions of the current gust loads process will become unacceptable. To introduce non-linearity into the gust loads process without significantly increasing the cost and time, this project has three main objectives: to carry out investigations using CFD so that the non-linearities in gust interactions are understood; to create a gust loads process that does not require wind tunnel data and hence reduces the need for wind tunnel testing; to develop updated reduced order models for gust prediction that account for non-linearity at an acceptable cost. These investigations will reduce the need for expensive wind tunnel testing and hence lead to time and cost savings at the design stage therefore ensuring that the European aerospace and defense industry remain competitive in the future. The wind turbine industry has similar concerns, with gusts and wind shear restricting the locations available for wind farms. The project will also address these issues using common methodology.
Collaborations with Major European Organizations
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This activity is complemented by several international interactions, in particular with Chalmers University in order to converge towards the real implementation of new control technologies on cars, buses and trucks.
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We have a crucial partnership with Optimad Engineering, a spin-off of the Politecnico di Torino. This society has implemented in industrial codes several schemes that we have developed for the past. In exchange, we have access to these codes. One example is Pablo, an octree managing parallel library (http://www.optimad.it/products/pablo/). Three former PhD students at Inria are presently employed in Optimad and several others have spent or will spend a research period in this company in order to get acquainted with code architecture and massive parallelism. This company represents for us an ideal partner for the actual industrial feedback on our methods. As mentioned, we plan to create a local start-up in close collaboration with Optimad. This start-up will respond to actual industrial needs by specific software packages built starting from open source tools that are made available to the applied research community via a consortium. Florian Bernard has been recruited in Memphis for two years with the objective of bringing to a higher maturity level a set of modules developed within the team. He plans to fully invest himself in the creation of the start-up. As for the consortium, we are discussing with several partners including Cineca (Italy HPC center) and Optimad about how to structure such a mutual effort. The Storm Inria team is included in the discussions as a possible partner.
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One project is the design of an ISWEC (Inertial See Wave Energy Converter) in collaboration with W4E (Wave for Energy), Optimad and others. The ISWEC is a floater prototype that can extract energy form the sea waves. The mechanism is based on a gyroscope that is rotating due to the passive motion of the floater. This prototype is actually tested in the Mediterranean sea in Italy. We will develop the numerical simulation as well as the shape optimization of the ISWEC.
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Partner 4: MRGM (Maladies Rares : Génétique et Métabolisme), Bordeaux University (France)
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We develop a collaboration with the MRGM lab. They are interested in the swimming of a zebrafish larvae under genetic modifications. One aim is to quantify the power spent by such fishes to swim after a stimuli reaction. The numerical simulation we develop can help computing integral quantities such as the power. This simulation is challenging due to the coupling several methods like image treatment (from movies given by MRGM), optimal transport and numerical simulations.
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Partner 5: CRPP (Centre de recherche Paul Pascal), LOF (Laboratoire du Futur) and LOMA (Laboratoire Ondes et Matière d'Aquitaine) labs, Bordeaux University, France.
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We established collaborations with physics and chemistry labs in Bordeaux, namely the CRPP, the LOF and the LOMA. They are concerned with the behavior of many passive (CRPP and LOF) and active (LOMA) particles in an incompressible flow. With these partners, we intend to use a combined experimental and computational approach to calibrate models in the case of dilute and concentrated suspensions. The numerical simulations of such particles can help to understand some underlying phenomena at the particles scale and thus to develop mesoscopic models for the whole system (PhD of Baptiste Lambert, oct. 2015).