At the end of 2017, the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” hosted the Flexible Engineering Toward Green Aircraft workshop. The objectives were to present the state of the art of research in the aerospace sector and to show the goals achieved by design and numerical analysis tools in support of aeronautical design. Professors and engineers from the world of research and industry gave an overview on themes as Aeroleasticity, Robust Design and Numerical Optimization. The seminar came at the conclusion of two European research projects in which the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” was involved: RBF4AERO and RIBES. In RBF4AERO, a multidisciplinary optimization platform based on mesh morphing technologies has been developed for the design of aircraft. The tool is able to face problems as fluid-structure interactions, ice growth and shape optimization. The platform was implemented on HPC also in the context of the FORTISSIMO European project. RIBES was focused on the increase of the accuracy of aeroelastic analysis methods based on coupling fluid dynamics and structural solvers. Furthermore, a significant part of the budget was dedicated to the realization of an experimental campaign of aeroelastic measurements in a wind tunnel on a realistic wing structure. The results of these two projects constituted the background for the event and gave the inspirations for the themes of the several presentations. The workshop was also followed remotely thanks to the university’s IT support.

The success of the event suggested to collect the contributions of the participants and to propose to Springer International Publishing the publication of a book based on the three topics of the seminar. The call for paper, which was not limited to the workshop participants, led to select ten quality papers that were subjected to a peer review process in which professors and researchers active in the field of European research were involved. The book, entitled Flexible Engineering Toward Green Aircraft: CAE Tools for Sustainable Mobility, was published last March in the series Lecture Notes in Applied and Computational Mechanics and was edited by the organizers of the workshop Marco Evangelos Biancolini and Ubaldo Cella. The book is opened by Paolo Colombo, ANSYS Inc.’s Global Industry Director of Aerospace and Defense, who provides a vision of the unexpressed potential of numerical modelling and a picture of the future scenario on software technologies in the field of aeronautical design.

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