GE Aerospace collaborates with ORNL to advance supercomputing in aerospace

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

ORNL houses Frontier, the world's fastest supercomputer, capable of performing more than a quintillion calculations per second.

"We have some of the world's most accomplished computer and computational scientists," said Gina Tourassi, associate laboratory director for computing and computational sciences at ORNL.

To model the performance of a full-scale Open Fan engine design, GE Aerospace developed computational fluid dynamics software that runs on Frontier.

Since its initial simulations on Frontier in 2023, GE Aerospace has run improved designs on the supercomputer to analyze different engine operating conditions and better understand aerodynamic characteristics and acoustic designs.