Urban Air Mobility: The Power of Virtual Twins and Advanced Simulation

The development of any aircraft brings together many fields of engineering, from aeronautics to electronics, and involves numerous stakeholders. These stakeholders include usual suspects, suppliers, partners, and customers. However, these stakeholders also include regulators and the government.

It’s important to ensure that all stakeholders have access to a centralized data repository, allowing them to only view what you choose them to, anytime, anywhere. This is where virtual twins technology and the 3DEXPERIENCE platform comes in. Acting as a single source of truth, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform allows you to shorten time to market, deal with complexity, and achieve a competitive advantage.

“The 3DEXPERIENCE platform will help us to develop and share the critical steps of requirements, ensure we’re developing the aircraft according to those requirements, do validation and also manage the certification of the aircraft with the authorities. It’s a one-stop shop and single source of truth for Vertical Aerospace and our business partners that allows us to work concurrently wherever we are in the world.”

— Eric Samson, Head of Engineering, Vertical Aerospace

One of the key capabilities delivered by the 3DEXPERIENCE platform is MODSIM. This application allows you to model and simulate at all stages of the product lifecycle from product requirement to design and manufacturing to in-use scenarios. Utilising this capability require less real-world prototyping and will allow you to enjoy faster physical certification testing—ultimately getting more innovative products to market faster.

The Power of Virtual Twins

Virtual Twin technology allows you to virtualize several realities where different scenarios can be simulated. This enables you to enhance the smallest field execution details and also address major skill shortages. You will be able to view all the relevant data—such as design requirements, model geometry, assembly, simulation and measurement data to build an accurate digital model of your product. From this, you will be able to simplify and streamline collaboration between teams on a single digital 3DEXPERIENCE platform.

Popularity of the use of virtual twins technology is on the rise. There has even been talk between regulators about the possibility of digital certification replacing some physical prototypes and test flights with virtual simulation. This would be especially useful for electric flight engineers who are developing aircraft radically different from an existing design. Taking part in this simulation would allow acceleration in the certification process.

If you are an emerging urban air mobility organization, there is a real benefit in utilising virtual twin technologies and advanced simulation. We believe that we can aid you in this endeavour and positively impact your design process.

Success with Virtual Twins and Simulation

Simulation can supplement measurement—and even sometimes replace it. Utilising this would enable you to save not only money, but also the development time that would be needed to build and test several rounds of prototypes. This is only possible however if you have a model that accurately represents reality.

Benefits of simulation

• Reliable Design: Our state-of-art applications are efficient, accurate, and robust for solving complex aerodynamic problems.
• Optimal Design: With simulation, engineers can optimize and trade-off factors including weight, power, energy consumption, noise, drag and experience.
• Collaborative Design: The 3DEXPERIENCE platform allows the free sharing of data to different stakeholders both internally and externally while maintaining control of who can access which information.
• Reduce Costs: Vehicle aerodynamic results are analyzed and shared early in the design process to reduce risk and avoid costly redesigns.
• Reduce Time: To reduce the product development cycle, leading companies are relying on science-based modelling and simulation (MODSIM).
• Get Certified: A digital thread from requirements to demonstrating the results through simulation will be the key for digital certification and compliance

Find out more

Get in touch today to find out how virtual twins technology, advanced simulation and 3DEXPERIENCE can catapult you into the future of urban air mobility.