Design for IGA-type discretization workflows

After more than a decade of research, IsoGeometric approaches are starting to make inroads into commercial solvers, and thus starting to be relevant in the industrial practice. Outstanding challenges still exist in the use of the underlying CAD technologies, and in particular in the use of “trimming”.

The main objective of the GECKO project is to help solving the outstanding difficulties by improving the current state of the art and by integrating academic research within the industrial workflow.

This will be achieved by ensuring that open-source solvers, developed in the academia for both solid and fluid dynamics, are able to use as an input domain any CAD geometry, even in cases in which the geometrical definition is not optimal, i.e. poorly defined or “dirty” geometries. In this regard, an efficient and robust solver design must be implemented to be capable of performing seamless “Design-through-analysis” workflows .

The goal will inherently imply collaborating with the pre/post processing industry (represented in the proposal by the company BETA-CAE), with solver vendors (DYNAMORE) and end users (IDIADA) to ensure that a smooth path is defined to allow such convergence.

The overall project outcome will be to form a new cohort of experts on the topic and to enhance the open source tools and operational workflow so that they can effectively complement commercial based approaches. This in turn will allow addressing relevant bottlenecks, as identified by the industrial partners, so that the solution can be eventually backported into commercial solutions.

Another important objective in the GECKO project is to empower and generalize the currently available solutions when dealing with complex non-linear models (Solvers) in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Computational Solid Mechanics (CSM), acoustics, vibro-acoustics, Reduced Order Models (RoM) and surface mapping.