Objectives

NEXTAIR brings together 16 partners from 6 countries, including 4 leading aeronautical industries, 3 innovative SMEs and 9 renowned research organisations. Together, they will develop and demonstrate innovative multi-disciplinary design methodologies, data-fusion techniques, and smart health-assessment tools enabling the digital transformation in aircraft design, manufacturing, and maintenance towards the next climate-neutral aircraft configurations. More specifically, NEXTAIR will develop Digital Enablers covering the whole aircraft life cycle (from the first design phases, including manufacturing aspects, up to operability) devoted to ease:

• breakthrough technology maturation by improving and advancing digital design models;
• flawless entry-into-service by efficiently accounting for all relevant sources of uncertainty;
• smart health-assessment by developing dedicated digital twinning methodologies.

Activities

The project activities are implemented through 8 Work Packages (WP) with specific objectives:

WP 1 - Digital Enablers for Efficient Aircraft Ecosystem Design

• Deliver new digital models, as part of DENs, or model-based validation and certification for commercial aviation,
  to be demonstrated and evaluated in application-centric WPs 3-6. 
• Ensure that the developed methods, workflows and codes, when used in WPs 3-6, will yield designs that can run
  in realistic time scales faster than with the state-of-the-art tools. 

WP2 - Machine learning for accelerating digital transformation

• Ensure that ML instruments are used in a principled way, by fully understanding the governing methodologies,
  limitations, and inherent biases.
• Guarantee that the methods, workflows, and codes passed to WPs 3-6 can yield end-to-end design, manufacturing and maintenance driven workflows that can run on realistic industry-deployable time scales and are a significant stepup from existing practices. 

WP3 - Next Generation Airframe Design

• Enable the design of future climate-neutral aircraft configurations featuring strong disciplinary couplings at realistic timescales by applying and maturing smart and Hi-Fi multidisciplinary digital design tools.
• Investigate the design of two next-generation aircraft configurations using multidisciplinary Hi-Fi methods; for
  small-medium range transport aircraft and laminar business jet and quantify the benefits of the newly developed capabilities in the context of the climate-neutral targets.
• Bring Hi-Fi MDO closer to the decision-making circles in the aircraft industry by efficiently generating Pareto fronts for computationally intensive and industry-relevant green configurations.

WP4 - Next-generation engine design and integration

• Define a rational driving towards an extended design framework for overall aircraft-emission and noise reduction
  while preserving the aero-propulsive gains envisaged by disruptive engine technologies.
• Increase the knowledge regarding the most critical interaction effects between the engine and wing to be taken into account from the preliminary design stage with efficient yet accurate strategies. 
• Implement modular workflows enabling the flexible integration of multiple disciplines and levels of fidelity to
  tackle complex optimisation problems in engine design efficiently.
• Demonstrate improved design capabilities for next-generation engine concepts and their airframe integration with respect to the state-of-the-art at the beginning of the project.

WP5 - UQ and Robust Optimisation for Flawless Entry into Service and Operability of New Components

• Ensure that the main sources of uncertainties are identified and considered when designing a new component.
• Apply more accurate and efficient UQ and RO techniques in the design of complex systems enabling the
  acceleration of aircraft design process and supporting its flawless entry into service.
• Extend the use of UQ and RO techniques from single disciplinary to MDO methods. 
• Enhance the confidence in simulation-based data to accelerate and support the certification process.

WP6 - Digital Twin of Future Engine Components

• Implement a Digital Twin from measurements (scanned parts, boroscope images).
• Ensure that the Digital Twin performance can be estimated using appropriate simulations.
• Implement a fast prediction of residual performance and life using AI tools from WP2.
• Implement an approach to optimise maintenance/replacement of components & their schedule.

WP7 - Dissemination, Exploitation & Communication

• Establish and implement effective dissemination, communication, and exploitation strategy to ensure wide-scale
  uptake of project results.
• Monitor the management of the knowledge created and ensure open access to the results of NEXTAIR.
• Contribute, upon invitation by the CINEA, to common information and dissemination activities to increase the
  visibility and synergies between HE/H2020 supported actions.

WP8 - Management

• Ensure efficient coordination and communication of the consortium with the EC and relevant stakeholders.
• Ensure an efficient technical, administrative and financial management of the project.
• Foresee any risks of delay and set up mitigation plans and corrective actions.