"'Exploring Aeronautics' was done in cartoon animation to make it appealing to kids," said Andrew Doser of NASA Ames, a graphic artist who helped produce the CD-ROM. "It was developed by a team of multimedia programmers, artists and educators, in conjunction with numerous NASA Ames scientists, to introduce future generations of engineers to the fundamentals of flight, different aircraft and how they fly."

Originally developed as teacher-paced software, the 'Exploring Aeronautics' CD-ROM is an excellent learning tool in a classroom setting and has been very popular with teachers. MakerToys has added a "Teaching Leader" to the CD-ROM as a tool to guide students through the wealth of information on the CD-ROM.

Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations are being used increasingly widely in industry and academia. More and more results of these simulations are relied upon to provide understanding and often both quantitative and qualitative data that is used to design, certify and understand flow systems. The complexity of the system simulated can mean that direct validation with test data is not always trivial, so it is important for the analyst to understand the level of confidence they can place on the result of the CFD simulations.

This seminar tackles the issues faced when trying to ensure CFD simulations are of a good quality and when determining the extent to which their results can be relied upon. It will be held in the offices of Sun Microsystems in Coventry, UK on 9th March 2004.

For further details, please contact Anne Creechan on 01355 225688, or visit the seminar website.

A key turbine design problem is turbine optimization for "as designed" and "off-design" regimes of operation. This issue can be effectively addressed with problem-oriented design-of-experiment (DoE) methodology.

Work was carried out with AxSTREAM™ software that has integrated DoE functionality. Implemented in the software a system of filters automatically suggest a set of project parameters from those that are relevant to a selected turbine design task. It makes a program very convenient to use and significantly speeds an optimization process.

The goal of the work was to demonstrate how DoE methodology facilitates optimization of the multistage axial gas turbine flow path using meanline approximation.

MultiSurface Aerodynamics provides all the components necessary for rapid conceptual design and analysis of multiple aerodynamics surface configurations. Surfaces can be designed using an interactive user interface that combines airfoil shapes, planform definition and placement. Each surface can be assigned an airfoils at its left and right tips (the software actually solves the mean cambered surface based on the airfoil camber lines). The program uses computational fluid dynamics to generate loads and moments for a user defined configuration. MultiSurface Aerodynamics can be used to model multiple aircraft wings (wing, tail & canards, for example), race car spoilers, sailboat keels, rudders, centerboards and sails.

The STAR-Works code is established as the technology-leading tool for engineers who need a single CAD and CFD solution to speed product development, cut costs and improve product quality. Combining the best-in-class CFD code STAR-CD with the market-leading SolidWorks 3D CAD system, it offers the best of both worlds: easy entry into 'simple' flow simulation, together with unlimited headroom to access the most advanced CFD when needed.

By accurately simulating the complicated reactive flow process in a hydrogen air bag inflator, TRW engineers gained useful design information that has already helped reduce cost and resolve design issues. Physical tests that are traditionally used to design air bag inflators show the performance of a particular design but provide almost no diagnostic information, making it difficult to make improvements. The challenge was accurately capturing both the stiff hydrogen-air reaction and the complex flow geometry without consuming inordinate computational resources. TRW engineers took advantage of a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software package that provides reliable solution algorithms and allows for substantial chemical reaction complexity. By creating the first accurate simulation of a hydrogen inflator, they were able to gain additional understanding of how the parts in the inflator influence combustion. This, in turn, has made it possible to fine-tune the critical combustion process according to the performance requirements of individual applications.