Collaborative Design Optimization with Simulation Process and Data Management

In the design of modern manufacturing products, design optimization is a key activity to improve product performance and reduce costs and time to market. In the automatic search of the design space, design optimization makes extensive use of virtual prototype simulations. Nowadays, engineering products draw together many components; each part is described by different physics and the performance assessment covers the whole range of engineering analysis, e.g. fluid-dynamics, structural, thermal, electro-magnetic, etc. Companies providing these different components may be a notable number and the simulation of physics dimensions may be addressed by each single player of the production chain counting on disparate levels of expertise and computing resources. This paper shows how an inter-organizational design optimization workflow has been set up using ESTECO technology for simulation process and data management to assess and optimize the performance of a wind turbine. Different organizations have been involved in the project: a company expert in wind power unit and expert in CAD (Computer Aided Design) and CFD (Computational Fluid-Dynamics), and ESTECO providing the SPDM (Simulation Process and Data Management) system. In the case presented in this paper, the partners successfully cope with a complex design scenario and effectively collaborate sharing different kinds of information and resources. The SPDM environment, thanks to the web interface and the collaborative environment for simulation process and data management, speeds up the communications among the partners, enforces standardization and the formalization of simulation processes, promotes knowledge reuse, and facilitates the sharing of the needed resources ranging from licensed software to computing power. Each partner of the simulation workflow brings his expertise for a single design analysis. The CAD expert generates the geometry of the blades providing a parametric model and the CAD solution used to update it. The CFD expert sets up the aerodynamic simulation model, which uses the geometry model to evaluate its aerodynamic performance, and makes it available to partners in a shared repository. Finally the wind power unit expert uses the data coming from the CFD simulation to evaluate, using an internally developed code, the power efficiency of the system in the complete range of conditions. While the CAD solver and the internal code can easily run on local resources, the CFD simulation may require a considerable amount of computational resources and software licenses. ESTECO technology allows organizations and teams to take full advantage of current on-demand cloud computing services such as Amazon EC2 or other public, private and hybrid cloud preserving the protection of the exchanged data through the use of virtual private networks and secure communications protocols. Once the design optimization workflow has been set up, the CAD expert submits, through the web interface, a parametric geometry that is optimized to meet the design requirements. Finally, users interested in the results of the optimizations can easily access and select the best designs.