Consortium

Airbus Defence & Space GmbH

Airbus Defence & Space GmbH (ADS) has profound experience in spacecraft system design and development for more than four decades resulting in successful missions, it has contributed to virtually all scientific and Earth observation missions in Europe, whether as spacecraft prime contractor, ground segment contractor, or as a major subcontractor.

ADS has designed, developed, tested and integrated attitude and orbit control systems (AOCS) and Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) systems for a large number of spacecraft and over many years. Through the AOCS background, the ADS team is in the heart of system matters in terms of spacecraft dynamics and control needs and the associated implementations.

Its experience includes low (LEO) and medium earth orbiting (MEO) satellites, satellite formations, geostationary (GEO) satellites, as well as interplanetary probes. This has provided a deep insight into the dynamical behaviour of a large number of rigid and flexible body types of spacecraft. As an integral part and due to increased pointing accuracy along with significantly larger amounts of on-board propellant, fuel sloshing effects have been studied and taken into account for the spacecraft controller design and verification for more than two decades. To do this, reduced order models (ROM) are typically derived from open-loop CFD analyses by well-established standard ADS processes and associated tools. In addition, closed-loop coupling between AOCS and CFD simulation has been successfully implemented and tested recently.

AIRBUS Operations Ltd

Airbus Operations Ltd is the British affiliate of the Airbus Group, the major aerospace company in Europe. In the UK, the Group is the largest commercial aerospace company and its biggest civil aerospace exporter; the biggest supplier of helicopters in the country; the largest space company and leading commercial provider of military satellite communications; the biggest supplier of large aircraft to the Royal Air Force; and a world leader in cyber security.

Each year Airbus Operations Ltd spends in excess of £5 billion with its suppliers. This supply chain comprises more than 4,000 companies, ranging from large primes such as Rolls-Royce and GKN to hundreds of small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) suppliers, each playing a vital role in helping Airbus deliver its world-leading products.

The company is engaged in the development and manufacture of advanced high-performance commercial transport aircraft and recognized for its technological expertise in nearly all fields of aeronautical engineering. R&D capabilities of Airbus Operations cover all aspects of aircraft design: aerodynamics, aeroelastics, structures, weights, performances, operating costs, environmental aspects, airframe and systems development and integration.

Recent examples for research projects, which are coordinated by Airbus Operations and are carried out in European Framework Programmes are (among others): RUMBLE, SARISTU, TOICA, e-CAB, AFLoNext, and the CleanSky Joint Technology Initiative.

Building on 100-years of aviation heritage, Airbus Operations Ltd is responsible for the development, testing and production of the wings, the fuel and landing gear systems for all Airbus models. The company’s workforce currently amounts to approx. 14000, with one-third working at the Airbus Operations site in Filton, Bristol, UK, where the majority of the wing engineering design work takes place.

Ariane Group GmbH

ArianeGroup formerly Airbus Safran Launchers is a joint venture of the European aerospace company Airbus and the French group Safran, with its three core businesses: aerospace (orbital propulsion systems and equipment), defence and security with the objective of development and subsequent production of Ariane 6. The company was established by 1 January 2015, its headquarters is in Issy-les-Moulineaux near Paris. The company's CEO is Alain Charmeau, Chairman of the Board is Marc Ventre. The company's sites are Issy-les-Moulineaux, Saint-Médard-en-Jalles, Kourou (space center), Vernon, Le Haillan and Les Mureaux in France as well as Lampoldshausen, Bremen and Ottobrunn in Germany.

Ariane Launch Vehicles
ArianeGroup is the primary contractor for manufacturing of the Ariane 5 launch vehicle, and provides commercial launch services through its subsidiary Arianespace. On August 12, 2015, the European Space Agency ESA appointed ArianeGroup as principal contractor with the new development of the Ariane 6.

Ballistic Missiles
In May 2016, Airbus and Safran agreed that their joint venture would work on upgrading the M51 submarine-launched ballistic missile to the M51.3 standard for the French Navy.

Orbital Propulsion Systems
The Orbital Propulsion Centre, a division of the ArianeGroup, is located in Lampoldshausen, Germany. The Lampoldshausen facility is the European centre of excellence for spacecraft propulsion. Most ESA satellites and spacecraft fly with thrusters or components from Lampoldshausen. The centre supplies complete propulsion systems, subsystems and component parts for satellites, orbital spacecraft, interplanetary spacecraft, re-entry vehicles, resupply missions to the International Space Station and currently the NASA / ESA Orion European Service Module.

EASN Technology Innovation Services

The European Aeronautics Science Network (EASN) is the Association of the European Academia active in Aeronautics research. The main objective of EASN is to support the development of new knowledge, innovation and breakthrough technologies through fundamental research in Aeronautics. The long-term goal of EASN is to develop an open, unique European platform in order to structure, support and upgrade the research activities of the European Aeronautics Universities and to facilitate them to respond to their key role within the European Aeronautical Research Community. It represents the European Academia in ACARE and other EU forums and committees. EASN currently has more than 320 registered active members, including individuals, university labs, universities and other organizations, through which it can network with more than 10,000 academic staff, researchers and scientists throughout Europe. Furthermore, EASN has agreements with industrial and SME groups and organizations for the dissemination and exploitation of knowledge and research related information.

The EASN Association will be represented in SLOWD by EASN-Technology Innovation Services (EASN-TIS). The latter is contractually linked to EASN and is exclusively authorized to act on its behalf in research projects, including project management and administration. EASN-TIS has significant experience in a plethora of research projects in which it predominantly leads the dissemination and exploitation activities. It also holds a strong experience in the coordination and management of networking services, networking research activities, networking building, dissemination and exchange of ideas. Apart for the above, EASN-TIS has also participated and currently participates in a number of Coordination and Support Actions (CSAs), the aim of which is the formation of strategic development policies related to aviation sector

Italian National Research Council

CNR is the National Research Council of Italy, a public organization committed to carry out, promote, spread and transfer research activities in the main sectors of knowledge growth. CNR is structured in seven departments (Earth and environmental sciences; Bio-Agriculture and food; Biomedicine; Chemistry and Material technologies; Condensed Matter; Engineering, ICT, Energy and Transport; Human, social sciences and cultural heritage), 110 research institutes and about 4000 researchers. The institute involved in SLOWD is CNR-INM (INstitute of Marine engineering) which has strong competencies in the field of hydrodynamics in marine and maritime engineering, fluid-structure interaction and hydro-acoustics and propulsion. CNR-INM develops computational tools and experimental setups in order to carry out the research work and to performing service/consultancy for industrial partners. Two CNR-INM researchers have been named (in 2003 and 2013) “Georg Weinblum Memorial Lecturer” (sponsored in Germany by the Institut für Schiffbau of the University of Hamburg) in recognition of their contributions to the field of marine hydrodynamics. CNR-INM has a long record of research projects funded by EU starting from FP4 framework, by the European Defence Agency (EDA) and by the US Office of Naval Research. The CNR-INM activities in SLOWD will be followed and coordinated by Andrea Colagrossi, although other researchers will contribute in the numerical investigations, in particular Dr. Salvatore Marrone will contribute to the activities on WP3 and WP5 and Dr. Matteo Antuono will be involved in some tasks of the WP3.

Sapienza University of Rome

Sapienza University of Rome (UoR) is the largest University in Europe and the second in the world for number of students and the wide academic offer that includes over 250 degree programmes and about 80 PhD programmes. Sapienza plans and carries out important scientific investigations in almost all the disciplines, achieving high-standard results both on a national and on an international level, thanks to the work of its 11 faculties, 63 departments and several centres devoted to scientific research. Further to the long practice in the field of teaching and research, Sapienza has been keen in developing a good network of relations with the entrepreneurial world that finances, through a massive number of R&D agreements, Sapienza researches activities. In the last ten years Sapienza research groups projects have been financed by EU funds for an amount exceeding 115 million euros. Until March 2018, Sapienza has successfully participated in H2020 with more than 60 collaborative projects funded by the European Commission. Sapienza constantly works to maintain and enlarge such network, with firms in order to establish concrete and longlasting partnerships favouring a strong bond between academic research and the business community. Such partnership is aimed at establishing a continuous dialogue between companies and researchers, so that the former can explain to the latter what are the most pressing market demands and they can jointly identify the most promising research paths.

The research unit of Sapienza UoR is formed by professors and Post Doc all members of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. The number of faculties from the Department are 60 (full, associated, and assistant professors), whereas the number of students are 850 for the three-year degree (Aerospace Engineering), 300 for the two-year degrees (Aeronautical Engineering and Space and Astronautical Engineering), 20 PhD students (Aeronautical and Space Technology), and 10 Post Doc. students. A Master course in Satellite Systems and Services, a Master course in Space Transportation Systems, and Master course in Civil Aviation Management are currently given. The research in the aeronautic field is focused on the developing of innovating structures and advance materials, on new theoretical and numerical methods to analyse the Flight Physics and aeroelastic modelling and multidisciplinary Aircraft Design. Several research activities have been carried during the last 40 years ranging from the development of the Italian satellite “S. Marco” to the development of methodologies to model behaviour of flying systems ranging from fixed wing aircraft to space launchers and the novel RPAS. In addition, this research entity is responsible of different national research programs in the aeronautical and space field. All these experiences are collected in several journal papers and presented in a wide number of international conferences.

STFC / UKRI

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is one of nine Councils within UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), a new organisation that brings together the seven UK’s Research Councils, Innovate UK and Research England into a single organisation that aims to ensure the UK maintains its worldleading position in research and innovation. STFC supports an academic community of around 1,700 in particle physics, nuclear physics, and astronomy including space science, who work at more than 50 universities and research institutes in the UK, Europe, Japan and the United States. STFC's main facilities are located at two UK campuses: the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire and the Daresbury Laboratory at Daresbury in Cheshire. Currently, STFC employs around 1,700 members of staff in addition to over 900 PhD students.

STFC's Scientific Computing Department (SCD) has over thirty years' experience in the design, implementation and development of world leading scientific software. It is internationally recognized as a centre for parallelisation, optimisation and porting of existing software to leading edge and novel architecture systems. In addition to domain expertise in a wide range of disciplines, the Department also has strong software engineering and numerical algorithms expertise. In particular, the SCD provides support for the development of large-scale scientific software applications, which is used for the UK's Collaborative Computational Projects (CCPs).

The group is involved in developing coupling tools for multiphysics simulation, using the Parallel Local and Exchange library (https://www.code-saturne.org/cms/) and developing the Multiscale/Multiphysics Universal Interface (MxUI) library (https://github.com/MxUI/).

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

(UPM) is the largest Spanish technological university. With two recognitions as Campus of International Excellence, it is outstanding in its research activity together with its training of highly qualified professionals, competitive at an international level.

More than 2,400 researchers carry out their activity at the UPM, grouped in 204 Research Groups, 19 Research Centers or Institutes and 55 Laboratories, all of them committed to transform the knowledge generated into innovation advances applied to the production sector, contributing to solve the challenges of the European citizens.

The intense collaboration with governmental bodies and industry guarantees that research at the UPM offers real solutions to real-world problems. The dynamism of R&D&I activity at the UPM, together with the transfer of knowledge to society, is among its lines of strategy.

These two commitments place it among the Spanish universities with the greatest research activity and first in the capture of external resources in a competitive regime. UPM headed the Spanish University participation in the 7th European Framework Program with 286 projects and 83M€ funding. During the first year of H2020 (2014), UPM has received more than 19M€ of funding with 58 projects approved.

UPM signs annually around 600 contracts with private businesses, due to its traditional and close relationship with the industrial and business sector, which supports and back its research and technology development in all Engineering fields, Aeronautics, Agronomy, Architecture, Energy, Forestry, Industrial, Mining, Naval and Informatics and Telecommunication.

Moreover, every year, UPM applies for around 40 patents and receives a similar number of concessions demonstrating a high commitment to innovation. One of the main UPM technology transfer driver is the business creation, such as ActúaUPM internal program that has generated 140 businesses in the last 10 years, 80% of which still exists.
All this shows that UPM is an institution committed to the transfer of knowledge generated through its research structures to society, and its transformation into advances and technological developments applied to the productive sector.

UPM Model Basin Research Group (CEHINAV, http://canal.etsin.upm.es/?lang=en) has been created around the model basin facilities of Naval Architecture Faculty (ETSIN) of UPM and it covers both experimental and numerical aspects of the Hydrodynamic field.

In the experimental field, CEHINAV has participated from 1988, in more than 200 projects under Article number 83 of the Spanish law for hire Universities. These projects are commissioned by both public and private companies and both national and international scope.

The LGAI Technological Center, S.A. under No. certifies its system of quality management. EC-4738/09 in accordance with the requirements of ISO 9001.

University of Bristol

The University of Bristol (UoB) is one of the most popular and successful universities in the UK and was ranked within the top 5% of universities in the world in the QS World University Rankings 2019. The Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of Bristol is well known for its excellent teaching, research; in the recent (2018) Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities, the Department was ranked 46th in the world. The Fluids and Aerodynamics Research Group, as part of the Aerospace Engineering department (92% of research outputs rated internationally excellent in the UK REF 2014 exercise), has a history of significant contributions to numerical and experimental fluid dynamics. These include the fully coupled CFD-SPH simulation of aeroelastic sloshing, direct implementations of unsteady CFD, as well as ancillary tools for fluid-structure interpolation, mesh motion, reduced order modelling, optimisation and geometry. In particular, meshless methods for grid motion and fluid-structure interpolation using radial basis functions have been developed extensively and subsequently adopted across a number of international research groups. Previous studies have included the simulation of sloshing in wing fuel tanks. The group has been involved in many EU and UK funded projects aimed at improving the prediction of aircraft and helicopter loads and the resulting responses.

The Dynamics and Control Research Group has a similar long history in the development of modelling nonlinear aeroelastic systems with the aim of reducing loads, increasing the flutter speed, and reducing weight leading to improved environmentally friendly aircraft designs. Major recent work includes the Innovate UK funded Agile Wing Integration project which has developed improved performance designs for High Aspect Ratio Winged aircraft using passive tip devices and composite tailoring; and the ALPES Marie Curie ITN which developed a range of novel modelling techniques, including Uncertainty Quantification and Sensitivity Studies, for nonlinear aeroelastic systems. Most of the work exploits the world-class experimental and computational facilities at the university.

University of Cape Town

The University of Cape Town was founded in 1829, making it the oldest university in South Africa. It is also the top tertiary institution in Africa, achieving a ranking of 171 on the Times Higher Education in 2017, and is the only African university under the top 200 on the list. Research is at the heart of the University’s mission and accounts for its prestige, boasting over 30 A rated researchers (highest national rating for researchers deemed undisputed world leaders) and has produced 3 Nobel Prize Laureates. The Department of Mechanical Engineering is a leading provider of aerospace research and teaching in South Africa. The Department has productive links with local and international industry including Airbus, while having served on the executive of the South African National Aerospace Centre. UCT has been an active participant of European Framework Projects and has successfully participated in 6 FP7 and several H2020 projects. The Department is also home to the South African Research (SARChI) Chair in Industrial CFD.

The SARChI Chair in Industrial CFD, whom will be the Principle investigator for SLOWD at UCT, has developed a world class research group at the University of Cape Town viz. Industrial CFD Research Group (InCFD). InCFD (http://www.incfd.uct.ac.za/home-178) today consists of 16 full-time members, and is the largest research team developing their own in-house CFD code in Africa. This includes 3 skilled research staff, 1 Post-Doctoral Fellow and 10 post-graduate students. The world class infrastructure established by the Chair includes a purposely designed CFD lab (accommodates 12 students and 4 staff) with dedicated access to 250 processors. The Chair has collaborated in R&T with the Airbus Group for more than a decade and has attracted more than Euro 2 000 000 over this period specific to aerospace delated CFD software development. The Chair has also served as Work Package Manager on two successful European Union Projects (FP7-FFAST and H2020-Aerogust).

Key to the InCFD Research Group translating fundamental numerical research into measurable impact has been its own home-grown CFD code. Dubbed Elemental, it has been paramount to the uniqueness and impact of the group and the many resulting awards. Nationally this includes the highest South African award for innovation viz. ‘NSTF-BHP Billiton Award for an individual or a team for an outstanding contribution to Science Education and Technology through research leading to innovation’. A major international accolade was setting a new world record in 2015: ‘World Record for a Class A Water Rocket’ from the Water Rocket Achievement World Record Association (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8WP9QCa2co). More recently, the InCFD group was bestowed with the Airbus award for ‘Best Innovation in Flight Physics for the year of 2017/2018’. This is an annual award from the world’s top aircraft company for the greatest design innovation in flight physics.