Dr Natalia Petrovskaya’s research in fluid dynamics for the Boeing Company has helped Boeing engineers to make substantial improvements in the design of the company’s products and in major savings in wind-tunnel and prototyping costs, in particular, in the development of the new 787 Dreamliner.
Research objectives
Building experimental models and full-size prototypes of airliners is an expensive business. Any reduction in the need for such models – for instance, by being able to simulate their behaviour in a computer – represents significant cost and time savings for the manufacturer. Dr Petrovskaya worked on improving the accuracy of the mathematical models used in the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), which uses mathematics to analyse and predict the flow of air over an aircraft’s wings and fuselage (in this case – CFD is also used in other industries for the design of trains, cars and ships’ hulls, among other applications).
Research outputs
Dr Petrovskaya discovered factors in the data used to do the calculations which affected the accuracy of the final results, and came up with a new approach to the data analysis that compensated for them, assisting in the design of a new computational toolkit for aircraft design. The research resulted in better understanding and therefore further improvements in the mathematical /computational techniques used to do the CFD calculations.
Impact of the research
Economic impact: Dr Petrovskaya’s research helped to improve the computational tools used for aircraft design at the Boeing Company. The research made a significant contribution to improvements in the quality and accuracy of the results from Boeing’s in-house CFD software, which is used extensively in the design of the company’s products – particularly the new 787 Dreamliner aircraft.
The intensive use of CFD brought financial savings in terms of reducing the time spent by skilled development engineers generating unproductive results, and in reducing the time and money spent on wind-tunnel testing by 30% for the 787 Dreamliner compared to the 777. Boeing has confirmed the existence of substantial financial savings to the company as a result but is unable to provide actual figures for commercial reasons.
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