GE AEROSPACE AND U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY TO EXPAND SUPERCOMPUTING CAPABILITY FOR REVOLUTIONARY NEW OPEN FAN ENGINE ARCHITECTURE  

GE Aerospace and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have reached a new Cooperative Research & Development Agreement (CRADA) on supercomputing, expanding the company’s capabilities to design next-generation aircraft engine technologies like Open Fan.

With the agreement, announced at Farnborough International Airshow, GE Aerospace and Oak Ridge will collaborate to develop new, state-of-the-art computational modeling and simulation capabilities. Oak Ridge’s expertise will help GE Aerospace better manage large simulations, more efficiently extract information, incorporate cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to improve understanding of results, and streamline the process to visualize the physics.

“Supercomputing and access to Frontier is changing the way we design jet engines, allowing us to solve previously impossible problems. We’re now able to digitally fly components of an Open Fan at full-scale in a simulated environment before the hardware is built,” said Mohamed Ali, senior vice president of engineering for GE Aerospace.

“Our expanded research collaboration through a new cooperative agreement with Oak Ridge National Laboratory will accelerate our engine design and testing, building confidence that Open Fan architecture is the most promising engine technology to help the aviation industry meet its net zero ambitions,” Ali added.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory is home to Frontier, the world’s fastest supercomputer, capable of crunching data at exascale speed, or more than a quintillion calculations per second. It is also renowned for its computing expertise.

“We have some of the world’s most accomplished computer and computational scientists. We are proud to bring them to this research and development agreement with GE Aerospace,” said Gina Tourassi, associate laboratory director for computing and computational sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

To model the aerodynamic and acoustic performance of a full-scale Open Fan engine design, GE Aerospace created computational fluid dynamics software capable of running on Frontier.

After an initial simulation in 2023, GE Aerospace now has run additional simulations of improved designs on Frontier that analyze different engine operating conditions to better understand aerodynamic characteristics and acoustic signatures.