A new artificial intelligence tool could accelerate the design of cutting-edge aircraft wings.
Luminary Cloud, a platform that uses advanced physics simulations to help engineers experiment with aerospace and automotive designs in the conceptual phase, on Tuesday announced the launch of Shift-Wing—a model and dataset geared specifically toward advanced wing designs. The model, which is publicly available for noncommercial purposes and can be licensed for commercial use, simulates wings designed for subsonic all the way up to transonic speeds.
Often, innovative concepts—such as transonic wings—are bogged down by a lack of performance guarantees and uncertain cost and schedule estimates. If a problem is discovered during flight testing, for example, a redesign could be expensive.
“Due to limitations of existing engineering simulation tools and reliance on simplified physics models, potentially superior designs remain unexplored,” Luminary said.
The company emerged from stealth in April 2024 to tackle that problem, encouraging engineers to develop breakthroughs by shortening the runway to design. Its AI-powered platform has already found a variety of customers, including longtime manufacturer Piper Aircraft.
Many users, though, are building novel aircraft. Electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) air taxi developer Joby Aviation, blended wing aircraft developer Natilus, stratospheric airship developer Sceye, and autonomous cargo aircraft firm Rune Aero are all experimenting with it.
Another customer, transonic aircraft developer Otto Aviation, helped Luminary create Shift-Wing. Otto’s Phantom 3500 concept incorporates a laminar flow architecture intended to reduce drag and fuel burn, which is not included in the model.
But the company runs its proprietary laminar algorithms on the Luminary platform to better understand the requirements for designing, building, and supporting its aircraft.
“This partnership with Luminary Cloud will complement Otto’s ability to unlock scale in generation of Otto’s proprietary physics-based simulation data, making it possible for our engineers to explore, optimize, and validate aerodynamic concepts faster than ever before,” Obi Ndu, chief information and digital officer of Otto, said in a statement.
Luminary said Shift-Wing’s “real-time, high-speed aerodynamic analysis” of aircraft performance allows aerospace engineers to explore and simulate more designs than previously feasible. Drag coefficient predictions, for example, are accurate within 2 percent, reducing the number of simulations needed to validate a design, the company said. Those evaluations can also be conducted more rapidly.
The idea is for engineers to be able to work out the kinks in a design during the conceptual phase rather than wasting time and money on a late-stage redesign.
Shift-Wing’s dataset comprises more than 4,000 Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) simulations, which are used to approximate turbulent airflows. The model was created by running data from NASA’s Common Research Model through Luminary’s systems and training it on varied angles of attack, configurations, and flow conditions using Nvidia’s software.
NASA uses a similar tool to help eVTOL air taxi developers such as Joby predict the noise output of their designs. But limitations uncovered in early research recently forced the space agency to pause work on its X-66 transonic truss-braced wing, which it is developing with Boeing.
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