SCIENCE

SANTA CLARA, CA -- Mechanical design software upstart think3 today announced that the CFD (computational fluid dynamics)-Stealth department of Dassault Aviation (Saint-Cloud, France), a leader in aeronautics, is deploying new software -- AMADEUS -- in order to increase its productivity for aerodynamic and stealth shape design, due to its collaboration with think3. think3's single-environment modeling software -- thinkdesign(TM) -- has been used as a basis for the development of Dassault Aviation's proprietary AMADEUS design system. AMADEUS essentially aims at pre-processing aircraft shapes from an aerodynamic/stealth point of view, including data import, specific geometry design and mesh generation. According to Dominique Lemarie, who leads the Aircraft Engineering Software Department for Dassault Aviation, one of the major objectives is to reduce the time to pre-process an entire aircraft significantly. While in some cases about 30 days were necessary with the preceding pre-processing chain, the performance target with AMADEUS is to pre-process within just a few days. Dassault Aviation has a half-century of experience and innovation in aeronautics. Established in 1945, the 9000-person organization designs and produces combat aircraft and has the distinction of being the only business jet manufacturer in Europe. More than 7000 civil and military aircraft have been delivered in 73 countries, on six continents, totaling 15 million flight-hours. Among the prestigious aircraft brands the company is best known for are the Falcon, Rafale and Mirage. Applied Research Teams Set Out to Streamline Design Process & Reduce Costs Five years ago, prior to its collaboration with think3 on AMADEUS, Dassault Aviation's applied research department used a proprietary shape modeler, David(TM), designed to achieve fluid dynamic optimizations, in combination with a variety of other software products. This dispersion of software tools rendered the design process "long, tedious and painful," while the sharing of engineering data was difficult and many times much too time consuming. "We believed that we could help lessen overall costs by migrating to one centralized piece of software that would be much more flexible to use," explains Florent Planchot, AMADEUS Technical Team Leader. "The fewer the products, the fewer data transfers and translations. That helps reduce risk of errors. Fewer errors result in better, more accurate products." With that goal in mind, the Amadeus team set out to find the right technology to create a brand new, single-system environment for aerodynamic/stealth shape design, capable of dealing with David-specific geometry and with CFD-meshes -- up to several million nodes. "So, we began a year's worth of evaluating CAD products to determine if any could comply with our requirements," says Planchot. "We ended up selecting thinkdesign (formerly Eureka Gold from Cad.Lab) because it met most of our requirements and also because think3 was willing to closely work with us in order to add the specific geometric and mesh objects that we needed, both into the User Interface (UI) and the Application Programming Interface (API) of the modeler. "Today, we simply open thinkdesign, which launches AMADEUS; a set of dialog boxes is then available to the user to work on shape design and mesh generation. We now have specific surface modeling, along with mesh generation in one system with which we can import model files (e.g. Catia files, IGES) coming from other departments." Future of AMADEUS: Advance the Technology Today, Amadeus software is under operational testing. AMADEUS Team intends to advance the technology to incorporate new functionality for pre- and post-processing. "The main goal is always to shorten the process chain," says Planchot. "So, if we can continue to incorporate new, advanced functionality into the product, we will not only save more time, but achieve more efficiently -- and with a still increasing quality -- the tasks related to aerodynamic/stealth pre-processing." For additional information visit www.think3.com