Hitachi Kokusai Electric Increased Airport Safety 20 Times Faster Thanks to Ansys Cloud and Ansys HFSS

Challenge

In 2000, a supersonic Concorde airliner crashed five minutes after taking off from Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. The investigation revealed that the cause of the crash was a 42 cm-long metal piece, which had fallen from the preceding aircraft onto the runway. To ensure this tragedy will not happen again, Hitachi Kokusai Electric participated in a government project to develop millimeter-wave radars for detecting foreign objects on runways,using Ansys HFSS and Ansys Cloud.

Engineering Solution

Hitachi Kokusai Electric determined that, given the electrical size of the problem, the most effective solver technologies in the HFSS portfolio for this analysis were the HFSS-IE method of movements-based solver and the asymptotic capabilities of the SBR+ solver, which can handle large models very effectively. HFSS provides multiple solvers for a range of analysis scales in an integrated user interface, allowing for use of different solvers for different analysis purposes. The study was run on an H16mr virtual machine of Microsoft Azure, featuring 16 Intel Xeon E5 2667 v3 processor cores.

Benefits

Ansys Cloud was 20 times faster than on-premise simulation (10 hours over 8.5 days)

• Basic performance of foreign object detection (FOD) radar was confirmed in the demonstration system installed at Narita International Airport and Kuala Lumpur International Airport.
• HFSS was used for radar cross section (RCS) calculations necessary for system evaluation.
• Engineers were able to use different analysis methods in HFSS depending on the analysis target.

This work was partly supported by the government project “Research and development of advanced radio frequency spectrum” from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) of Japan.