Multidisciplinary collaboration made easy at Airworks Engineering

Multidisciplinary collaboration made easy at Airworks Engineering

Airworks, a multidisciplinary company for mechanical engineering, was facing the challenge of improving efficiency in the conversion of wind energy into electrical power by optimizing the whole assembly of a wind power unit rotor.

Challenge

Experts in wind power unit, specialists in CAD (Computer Aided Design) and CFD (Computational Fluid-Dynamics) professionals from different organizations were involved in a complex design scenario and needed to collaborate by effectively sharing a different kinds of information and resources. Engineers from the University of Trieste prepared the parametric CAD model and set up CFD simulations, while Airworks took care of aerodynamic performance calculations of the wind rotor blade, and subsequently performed optimization analysis with modeFRONTIER, the multidisciplinary optimization platform. The need for a common platform to share results emerged rapidly, and was successfully tackled with SOMO software solution (now evolved in VOLTA SPDM enterprise platform). This enabled the seamless execution of inter-organizational simulation workflows.

Solution

With SOMO each partner of the simulation workflow was able to contribute to the project providing its own high level of collaboration. The CAD expert generated the geometry of the blades providing a parametric model and the CAD solution used to update it, while the CFD expert set up the aerodynamic simulation model, which used the geometry to evaluate the rotor aerodynamic performance. Both simulation workflows were made available to partners in a shared repository. Then the wind power unit expert was able to integrate his performance evaluation software into an automated multi-disciplinary workflow. Ultimately he used the workflow to evaluate the power efficiency of the system and to optimize it in a complete range of environmental conditions.

Benefits

Through the entire process, simulation data and engineering knowledge were effectively managed and shared through SOMO, allowing a faster process and a considerable resource-saving”, says Stefano Picinich, Airworks Engineering Managing Director. With the set up of the optimization workflow, Airworks professionals were able to explore and evaluate new parametric geometry, leading to innovative designs, analyzed by the decision-maker via the post-processing tools. The considerable result was of a wind turbine design with an outstanding power coefficient and an annual energy production increase of respectively 1.26% and 0.47%.