Inspired by “National Strategic Plan for Advanced Manufacturing” from the U.S. Government, Germany’s “Industrie 4.0” plan and “The Future of Manufacturing：a new era of opportunity and challenge for the UK”, the Chinese Government has unveiled a ten-year national plan in 2015, Made in China 2025. The initiative aims to comprehensively upgrade Chinese manufacturing industry, and commits to transform China from a manufacturing industry into a smart, high-quality sector. Of five major projects included in the “Made in China 2025”, intelligent manufacturing is crucial and has been identified as priority. Digital design and manufacturing are essential for intelligent manufacturing. During the whole production progress, they provide key common technologies, and are supported by scientific modelling and simulations. To boost digital manufacturing, modelling and simulations of complex process systems using high-performance computing (HPC) system play an important role.
Digital design, based on numerical simulation, has become a necessary choice to accomplish a more efficient and innovative design of complex structures and objects. This technique has been widely used in the field of shipbuilding, automobile, aviation, aerospace, energy, biology, etc. By means of numerical simulation, the Boeing Company has successfully developed Boeing 787-airplane by only 11 wind tunnel tests, while the development of Boeing 767 cost to conduct 77 wind tunnel tests in 2005. It has also contributed the developments of turbine blades of Three Gorges Dam, single-crystal blades in aero-engine, and China’s home-built C919 passenger jet. However, simulation platform aimed at digital design is currently not well-developed in China due to the lack of simulation softwares. Therefore, most related research have to choose to use commercial softwares such as Fluent and CFC, etc, with costly expense and limit on efficiency and accuracy.
The simulation platform aimed at digital design will focus on platform architecture and design, such as setting up model lifecycle management, that provides data based intelligent management method, and building an interactive system. To provide a more efficient and user-friendly development environment, the platform will create a multi-discipline software framework that allows parallel program running, and support a high-order calculation method. This function is expected to make a breakthrough in running multitudinous numerical simulation jobs and optimising pre- and post-process progress. The platform will also deploy modelling research with precise physical description for complex objects and process, and establish multi-scale mathematical modelling for multiphase flow study, fluid-solid interaction calculation, electromagnetic analysis, etc. Additionally, this platform will also contribute to in-depth research on equipments for commercial and military use. It will provide a great support for product realization from design conception and engineering to manufacturing, and shore up the development of innovative intelligent manufacturing.
The institute has worked with the team leading by academician Xuejun Yang from PLA Academy of Military Science to carry out the research of multi-scale parallel computing framework and support technology. As a current achievement, a multi-scale massive parallel computing platform has been developed with independent intellectual property right. The algorithms covered in this platform are microscopic molecular dynamics simulation, Boltzmann lattice and smoothing particle based dynamics simulation, continuum mechanics research based on finite volume and finite element method etc. HopeFOAM developed by Exercise team from PLA Academy of Military Science is a CFD software based on high-order large-scale will provide a great technical support for aviation manufacturing, shipbuilding, automobile manufacturing, pump manufacturing, medical device manufacturing, wind power, nuclear power, etc.
