Modern tools: Aircraft manufacturers and suppliers are striving to speed up the aircraft certification process, which is primarily based on physical tests. Many efforts for achieving certification by analysis have been constrained by legacy analysis tools and processes. The intuitive user experience and integrated solution workflows of Altair HyperMesh™ are bringing increased efficiency to the certification by analysis processes across the industry. Altair OptiStruct™ includes an enhanced proprietary version of NASTRAN that is used in virtually every industry. OptiStruct provides solvers for linear, nonlinear, vibrations, acoustics, fatigue, heat transfer, and multiphysics analyses.

Analysis Report Automation: Creating detailed stress reports can be time consuming and repetitive, taking up valuable engineering time better spent interpreting and understanding simulation results. Process automation can decrease report generation and update time by up to 80 percent. Altair Automated Reporting Director™ ensures all reports are assembled with a standard structure and format for the model description, model verification, and results presentation.

Optimization and Minimum Weight Designs: OptiStruct is the original topology optimization structural design tool. To reduce product development time, organizations need to use simulation and optimization to drive designs rather than validate them. To achieve this, we empower engineers to apply simulation and optimization up-front in the design cycle with tools such as Altair Inspire™ and Altair SimSolid™. These tools support the analysis, optimization, manufacturing checks, and geometry editing functions required to power fast design iterations and decision making early.

Multiphysics Simulation: Altair provides multiphysics-enabled software to enable a wide range of interacting physical models to fully describe a system’s mechanical, electromagnetic, and aerodynamic performance. For example, the air pressure field during flight on a radome can be simulated with Altair AcuSolve™, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver. The pressures can then be mapped onto an OptiStruct model to accurately predict the structural response of the radome under aerodynamic load.

Antenna Design and Placement: More airborne radio equipment is being installed on aircraft. Typically, an aircraft is equipped with dozens of systems – weather radars, communication and navigation systems, surveillance, and air traffic control equipment – requiring multiple and different antennas types working at different frequency bands. The performance of an antenna is influenced by the structure it is mounted on. Altair Feko™ enables optimization of antenna design and placement for system integration.

Electromagnetic Compatibility: Electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) ensures the safe operation of an aircraft by verifying conformance with EMC immunity and emission standards. Feko® can simulate important EMC criteria including antenna coupling to ensure radio system performance and sensitivity to high-power radio signals from external systems called high-intensity radiated fields (HIRF). Simulation guides design decision to mitigate HIRF effects that can induce electromagnetic fields around equipment or high frequency currents on cables leading to a degradation of equipment performance.