MSC.Software Announces MD Nastran Rotor Dynamics Success

MSC.Software and Boeing Commercial Airplanes announced today MD Nastran Rotor Dynamics has successfully met its two-year goal to provide an industry standard for rotor dynamics simulation. MD Nastran Rotor Dynamics provides the standard that allows aerospace jet engine and airframe manufacturers to cut time-to-solution and improve analysis collaboration. MD Nastran Rotor Dynamics is a cooperative effort between NASA, Boeing, major Boeing partners, and MSC.Software to enable collaboration between jet engine and airframe manufacturers. "When you look at the requirements of a rotor dynamics code, such as blade out simulation, there are no other codes in the world that can perform this combination of analysis," said Dr. Charles Lawrence, structural engineer, Structures and Acoustics Division, Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field, NASA. "These models are incredibly large -- millions of degrees of freedom. MD Nastran is the only code that can take these large models and abstract them to smaller models and still produce accurate results. This is the industry-standard solution aerospace companies are using and will continue to use in the future to come up with better answers when designing propulsion systems." "With a fully integrated linear and nonlinear solution MD Nastran provides the capability to simulate short-duration explicit events such as bird-strike and blade-out with rotor dynamic simulations. MD Nastran makes it possible to simulate Propulsion System dynamics behavior such as rotor unbalance, blade out and other critical conditions at a small fraction of the cost of a single physical test," said Reza Sadeghi, Vice President of Product Development for MSC Software. "MD Nastran Rotor Dynamics provides an industry standard, which allows collaboration between jet engine manufacturing partners and air frame manufacturers, reducing the silos of simulation technology that exist within today's enterprise environment, to further improve propulsion system analysis reliability." "More than ever, today's manufacturers seek to improve the richness of the complex propulsion system simulation process to provide even greater representation of the physical world scenarios simulated today," said Technical Fellow Mohammad Heidari, Boeing Commercial Airplanes Propulsion technology. "MD Nastran Rotor Dynamics provides an integrated solution that will further help manufacturers to better predict, and help reduce the number of physical tests they currently conduct to develop and certify propulsion systems." Propulsion system design is a collaborative process, requiring model and results accuracy. Propulsion system and airframe manufacturers had been using home-grown codes coupled with Nastran, which required significant effort to compare simulation results from different models. MD Nastran Rotor Dynamics reduces the time-to-solution compared to single point tools used for such multidiscipline applications because customers work with a common model instead of multiple models for each type of analysis. The ability to perform standardized analyses and exchange a common model results in much higher productivity and fewer bottlenecks.