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Airbus Opens A Numerical Simulation Center

Airbus has sponsored the opening of an advanced new aircraft simulation facility in Germany. The facility, called C2A2S2E, will have traditional simulation equipment such as a wind tunnel and flight testing equipment, as well as advanced computational numeric simulation facilities.

Much of the flight testing and simulation that goes into the design of an aircraft is now done through incredibly complex numerical simulations on computers. These numerical simulations are designed to test the efficiency of aerodynamics, flight performance, and flight safety, and can speed up the approval process of newly developing airplanes.

These numerical simulations are incredibly complex and require very powerful computers. The new facility will speed up the numerical simulations, that could sometimes take as long as a year to fully complete,  and that could in theory be finished in minutes with the processing power of future computers that will be as much as a million times faster than the current maximum speed at present.

The computer simulations are designed to create a real time accurate flying simulation of a new aircraft.

The new computer testing will allow the designers to fully test new aircraft in the computer, eliminating many of the design problems, before the aircraft ever gets to the manufacturing process.

The new computational processes are hoped to greatly reduce the costs associated with aircraft development, as well as speed up the development and approval process.