CAEUp - Update of CAE models on actual manufactured shapes

Engineering fields with high technological contents involve manufacturing requirements in which the control of the margins of tolerance, as well as the verification of the manufactured components, has economic impacts in the relationships with customers. The verification of the actual geometry after manufacturing then acquires paramount importance, and it can be substantially improved by adopting the digital twin approach: the CAE model of the system is adapted onto the actual manufactured shape making the numerical prediction individual manufactured component specific. CAEUp aims at implementing a cloud-based software tool whose core is the comparison of the structural performances between the CAE model relative to the nominal design of a certain product and the digital twin of the real product as built. The digital twin is updated on High Performance Computing (HPC) cloud infrastructure and the performance prediction recomputed adopting a variation of the CAE model shaped like the actual manufactured part. The process is demonstrated adopting a specific example: the structural assessment of a simplified turbine blade geometry. The baseline geometry, available as a CAD model, is adopted to define the reference FEA model for the ANSYS® MechanicalTM solver so that key performance indexes can be computed (stress level and stiffness). The actual manufactured shape is surveyed and available as a tesselated surface (the standard STL format is herein adopted). The projection and adaption using mesh morphing allows to morph the baseline FEA model onto the actual manufactured shape; finally the updated FEA model is run again to extract performance indexes and decide whether the component fulfills the design specifications.