Vera: A new paradigm to enable efficient design of VERy large Aircraft structures - the key for innovative aircraft design concepts

Aircraft design is stuck using a slow, experiment-by-experiment approach that cannot handle the complexity of the next generation of large composite planes. This matters because the aerospace industry needs radically new aircraft shapes to cut emissions and use new energy sources, but the current design pyramid—building and testing physical prototypes step by step—is too slow and expensive to explore those options. The core problem is that simulating an entire very large composite structure all at once is computationally impossible today. The researcher proposes a new simulation paradigm: computer models that adapt their level of detail in real time, reconfigure their own structure during analysis, and use high-performance computing to sift through over one terabyte of output data as it is generated. If successful, this would let engineers design fully integrated composite wings, fuselages, and other large structures numerically for the first time. The potential impact is a faster path to cleaner, more efficient aircraft configurations—blended-wing bodies, truss-braced wings, or other designs that reduce fuel burn and enable electric or hydrogen propulsion. This is applied engineering research with a clear practical goal: unblocking a bottleneck that currently prevents the industry from building the planes it needs.