FALCON

The EU-funded project FALCON (Foreseeing the next generation of Aircraft: hybrid approach using Lattice-boltzmann, experiments and modelling to optimize fluid/struCture interactiONs) has started in January 2024 for a duration of 4 years and is coordinated by the Université d'Aix-Marseille, France. The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101138305. The FALCON partners (from 6 countries: Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Spain, UK) each bring unique expertise in experimental and numerical approaches in fluid and solid mechanics:
Aix-Marseille University,
Protisvalor,
Centre national de la recherche scientifique,
Centrale Méditerranée,
Airbus,
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT),
CS GROUP,
MSC Software,
German Aerospace Center (DLR),
IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center,
Euronovia.

FALCON's goal is to enhance the design capabilities of the European industrial aircraft sector by focusing on fluid–structure interaction (FSI) phenomena to improve the aerodynamic performance of aircraft (unsteady loads). FALCON assembles a unique interdisciplinary environment of fifteen public and private institutions and their affiliated entities (from renowned research institutions to SMEs and aircraft high-tier suppliers and integrators) to cover all the required scientific and know-how expertise. Building upon three industrial test cases and tight links with key European partnerships such as Clean Aviation, FALCON delineates a high-impact/low-risk proposal that will significantly contribute to the digital transformation of the European aircraft supply chain (see LinkedIn).

As a participant in the FALCON project, the Lattice Boltzmann Research Group (LBRG) is involved in work packages 2, 3, 4, and 5, starting with physical model development, its validation, embedding into adjoint optimization solvers, and software parallelization for higher-scale HPC machines. In terms of physical and numerical modeling, the LBRG will create a monolithic simulation algorithm based on LBM for FSI calculations of e.g. aerodynamic wing dynamics. After validation on chosen academic benchmark problems, the novel monolithic approach will be applied to chosen industrial test cases. To enable efficient and energy-saving designs, adjoint and backward automatic differentiation solvers will be developed to solve aerodynamical FSI optimization problems on petascale and pre-exascale HPC clusters.

This project is funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme

Grant agreement number 10113830






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