AEROSPACE

Company Now Able to Conduct Fluid Structure Interaction Analysis to Improve Product Design: SGI today announced that Irvin Aerospace, a world leader in the design, development, and manufacture of best-of-class parachutes, has enhanced its engineering simulation and analysis capabilities with the addition of SGI technology used to couple Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Finite Element Analysis to create a Fluid Structure Interaction (FSI) analysis capability. With its new SGI Altix systems, Irvin Aerospace has the much-needed capability to do more complex analyses on a greater variety of fluid flow problems, resulting in a dramatic speed up in application run time and the optimized performance of software applications. The running of the FSI application on the Linux-based SGI Altix system enables Irvin Aerospace to model a wide range of real-world conditions, including the rollover characteristics of a range of military vehicles, airbag and water landing of a variety of spacecraft systems and the flying performance of parachute designs in subsonic and Supersonic flight regimes. These capabilities are quickly becoming critical to a number of advanced programs. With the computing power of the SGI Altix family of servers, Irvin Aerospace now has the ability to create computer models ten times larger than were previously possible, allowing the company's engineering team to take its simulation and analysis to the next level. The complementary architectures of the SGI Altix shared-memory server and SGI Altix XE cluster, both running the industry standard Linux operating system, provide a mixed workflow environment for both capacity and capability computing that enable design engineers and analysis professionals to deliver superior product design more quickly and efficiently. Among the applications Irvin Aerospace uses are LS-DYNA(R) software, a general-purpose transient dynamic finite element program, to simulate the deployment of parachutes as well as CFD effects and impact, and Altair OptiStruct, a highly advanced finite element based software for design optimization. "With this computing power, Irvin engineers can simulate small modifications of size and form to improve design performance without the unnecessary high cost and time consumption of field product testing," said Robert Shiley, General Manager of Irvin's Engineering Organization. "We are very excited about the opportunities the SGI Altix presents. These best-of-class analysis and predictive capabilities and services can be bundled and customized to help our customers to optimize designs, reduce cost and development time and risk and enhance value. Ultimately, our plan is to also outsource this technology to other companies for a variety of other applications. Our SGI Altix system can be used to design better products by simulating and analyzing the dynamics and aerodynamics for a host of applications." Irvin Aerospace, headquartered in Santa Ana, Calif., designs, develops, and manufactures parachutes for space and air vehicle recovery systems, deceleration systems for high-performance aircraft, military, personnel, and cargo parachute systems as well as ordnance flare chutes, airbags, and weapons delivery systems. Irvin's R&D group also designs a wide variety of deceleration systems for custom applications. SGI offers two complementary server architectures: the SGI Altix product line based on dual-core Intel Itanium processors and the SGI Altix XE product line based on dual-core Xeon processors. SGI works closely with software vendors to ensure applications for both fluid and finite analyses are optimized and parallelized for the SGI Altix and Altix XE product lines. The SGI Altix shared-memory architecture includes scalability and interoperability from desktop to supercomputer.