PACE 

Rapid setup of aircraft models

Drawing on Pacelab Suite’s unique modeling approach, Pacelab APD provides the basic building blocks for all major tasks involved in preliminary aircraft design including geometric aircraft components such as lifting surfaces, fuselage or engine models, mass and aerodynamic estimation modules and a comprehensive performance calculation kernel to analyze design and off-design missions.

Early assessment of key performance parameters

Pacelab APD provides a reliable basis for decision-making as it allows evaluating alternative concepts in terms of feasibility, performance and cost and assessing of the impact of technological innovations early in the design process.

Exhaustive exploration of the design space

Multidisciplinary optimization and trade-offs help to systematically explore the design space and achieve an optimum balance between conflicting technical and non-technical requirements.

High scalability and extensibility

Pacelab APD is designed to adapt to and grow with your engineering tasks. Its data model can be easily extended to accommodate more detailed models of aircraft components or non-conventional aircraft configurations. To fully leverage corporate engineering know-how and IT investments, Pacelab APD also supports the integration of commercial analysis tools, proprietary methods, legacy data and codes.

Pacelab APD supplements the early-stage product design capabilities of the Pacelab Suite platform, with an additional functional layer that supports the specific tasks of aircraft conceptual design:

Aircraft configurations and model libraries

In just a few steps, a wide range of aircraft configurations can be derived from Pacelab APD’s parametric data model. Smart interactive features allow a quick and interactive definition of the baseline aircraft through the installation and positioning of predefined components such as wings, tail surfaces, engines or undercarriages. In addition, a resident aircraft library offers a comprehensive set of ready-to-use commercial and corporate aircraft models complete with physical and performance characteristics.

Extensible library of analysis methods

Pacelab APD provides a standard set of analysis methods for weight, high-speed and low-speed aerodynamics, flight performance, and static stability which can be flexibly replaced with proprietary and higher fidelity methods such as vortex lattice, Euler or Rans.

Powerful flight performance model

Pacelab APD provides a comprehensive flight performance model, which allows the calculation of point, segment and mission performance based on user-defined design and off-design missions. Even complex, multi-leg missions can be set up easily in a flexible, graphical-interactive manner.

Analysis and optimization capabilities

Pacelab APD provides a large, extensible set of predefined calculation cases that represent typical design scenarios. Recalled with a few mouse-clicks, calculation cases enable users to easily swap sets of input and output parameters of a calculation without manual tweaking. This significantly speeds up iterative tasks like calibration and thrust scaling. Drawing on predefined calculation cases, users can automate the highly iterative task of parameter calibration by simply defining the target value and calibrating the influencing parameters.

N-dimensional trade studies help to investigate the behavior of output parameters when a set of related input parameters are varied, taking user-defined constraints into account and highlight violations in charts or reports. Pacelab APD also fully supports numeric optimization use cases geared towards the identification of optimal values of key design parameters with a fully extensible library of gradient methods and genetic algorithms (e.g. NLPQLP, Frontline Systems).

Pacelab APD

for interdisciplinary preliminary aircraft design
product data sheet pdf