State of the art test capabilities are described that can enable optimised electronic warfare (EW) system development programmes for military air platforms. EW systems are key enablers of air platform survivability and the above is important as defence ministries and industry world-wide wrestle with affordability, technical and industrial challenges. The military end user needs improved capability quickly, with high availability; defence ministries want this at lowest possible cost and with minimum risk. Satisfying these requirements, while remaining in business against a background of fierce international competition and world financial crisis, is indeed challenging. Improvements are described that can enable improved technical performance and lower cost, time and risk programmes than hitherto, with emphasis on RF EW systems and the recent multi-£M upgrade to BAE Systems’ EW Test Facility, with its aircraft-sized anechoic chamber. This upgrade assures a further decade of world-class UK capability for testing manned and unmanned air platforms.

When defining a new product like an aircraft, space access vehicle or space mission, the Advanced Projects Group evaluates the available design space and compares it with the design space required to accomplish the specified mission. As with any product development process, the general life-cycle characteristics are established first during the conceptual design (CD) phase, clearly before a design proposal can be released to the follow-on design phases such as preliminary design (PD), detail design (DD), flight test (FT), and finally operation and disposal. As a rule of thumb, it can be assumed that around 80% of the flight vehicle configuration and mission tandem are determined during the CD phase alone, which is the key phase where the initial brainstorming has to take place. Clearly, it is the responsibility of the CD team to simulate the entire life-cycle of the project from ‘cradle to grave’ where the focus is on correctness rather accuracy in order to identify the design space and offer an overall proof of design convergence. Currently, the important primary aerospace vehicle and mission design decisions at CD level are still made using extremely simple analysis and heuristics. A reason for this scenario is the difficulty in synthesising the range of individual design disciplines for both, classical and novel aerospace vehicle conceptual designs, in more than an ad hoc fashion. Although the CD segment is seen as the most important step in the product development phase due to its pre-defining function, it is the least well understood part of the entire product evolution process due to its level of abstraction. This paper presents the roadmap towards the next generation of aerospace life-cycle synthesis systems, a software and management process capable to immediately calculate cost and time implications while simultaneously linking design, manufacturing, testing, and operation. A historical review of how design has been accomplished until today is presented. The design approaches are categorised and the characteristics of today’s state-of-the-art design synthesis systems are discussed. A specification for the new class of intelligent generic design synthesis systems is presented capable of satisfying the demands imposed by the new breed of high-performance aircraft, space access vehicles, space missions, and others. Finally, the development status of the next generation aerospace vehicle design synthesis (AVDS-PrADO) simulation-based acquisition environment is presented.

This paper presents a computational analysis regarding the effect of the camber line deformation due to structural errors, on the aerodynamic behavior of a high-pressure steam turbine.

In several cases, inaccuracies in the blade geometry can lead to undesirable flow phenomena strongly affecting its overall performance when put in service. The effect of the camber line deformation on the performance of an experimental axial steam turbine is investigated hereafter. A high fidelity inspection of the actual geometry of both a stator and a rotor blades randomly chosen among the similar blades of the same row has been carried out, using a 3D co-ordinate measurement machine. The cross sections of the blades obtained by the measurement were compared with those produced by the design process to evaluate the change in blade inlet/exit angles. The actual (measured) model has been used as input into a streamline curvature solver to evaluate its overall performance assuming a uniform distribution of the geometrical error across the blades of the same blade row, the loss generation mechanisms within the flow field have been further investigated and analysed using a high fidelity 3D Navier-Stokes solver.

A measurable change of efficiency as well as in the total power delivered by the turbine was found. This suggests that the accumulated error caused during the manufacturing procedure plays a significant role in the overall performance of the machine by making it less efficient by almost 1% due to the intensification of the hub and casing secondary flows, as well as to the thicker boundary layers on the blade surfaces revealed by the numerical prediction of the flow.

A real-time model of a wake vortex has been developed for an engineering flight simulator, which enables studies to be undertaken into the effects of wake vortex encounters with civil transport aircraft. A brief summary of the methods used to create a vortex model and integrate it with a real-time flight simulator is presented. Tools have been developed to determine the structural loads on an aircraft during a simulated wake vortex encounter and to visualise the airframe loads. Four wake vortex encounters were flown with different pilot recovery strategies and automatic flight controls. It is clear from analysis of these results that it is difficult for a pilot to appreciate the margin of tail loading during an encounter and a prototype training display is outlined to enable pilots to fully understand the effects of rudder inputs in recovery from these events.

Knowledge is a vital component of engineering design. Computer systems enriched with logic and engineering knowledge can support engineering design by automating repetitive and time-consuming processes. This automation is enabled using knowledge based engineering (KBE) techniques and can be obtained using dedicated KBE systems or augmented CAD systems, already pervasive throughout engineering industry. The development of these KBE applications is supported by a six-phase development process ranging from engineering process analysis to software development to business implementation. Distinctions and similarities exploiting alternative KBE platforms are addressed for each phase of the development process. An example KBE application is discussed, supporting the design of laminate aircraft fuselage panels. The implementation of the application is emphasised and five key-aspects required for a successful implementation are defined.