KBE software provider PACE today announced the immediate availability of Pacelab APD 1.1, the latest upgrade of its knowledge based engineering tool for conceptual aircraft design. The new release enhances the software's model building capabilities with an updated aircraft library and extended interactive configuration options. Pacelab APD 1.1 also provides additional predefined analysis scenarios, which significantly speed up iterative tasks like calibration and thrust scaling.

The upgrade was developed in close cooperation with Pacelab APD's launch customer, who is one of the world's largest manufacturers of aircraft propulsion systems. The shared aim was the conception of a software application that specifically supports the early stages of aircraft development and enables a flexible and efficient definition and execution of aircraft design and analysis tasks.

Merging the KBE capabilities of PACE's multidisciplinary design platform Pacelab Suite and the company's longstanding expertise in the flight performance analysis domain, Pacelab APD addresses the core disciplines of early-stage design including geometric definition, mass estimation, aerodynamic breakdown analysis and performance calculation.

Particular emphasis was placed on the provision of well-defined interfaces that give customers every option to extend the scope of the application with proprietary methods, higher-fidelity analysis tools, unconventional aircraft configurations and additional engineering disciplines. Due to the ability to flexibly incorporate customized functionality, Pacelab APD is also being applied as a platform for aircraft-level investigations of sub-domains such as systems architecture design and structural analysis.

A research team at the Aerospace Systems Design Lab (ASDL) at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta leveraged this capability in a recent project focused on optimizing the placement of aircraft equipment systems at the aircraft level. The objective was to develop improved methodologies for evaluating alternative architectures and analyzing their impact on weight, energy use, and performance of the overall vehicle. The project was in direct support of the AIAA program committee for the Energy Optimized Aircraft and Equipment Systems (EOASys).