The regular old FEM based models can be quite misleading and when I had the chance to dig into them some years ago, it made me vaguely anxious. Except that nobody trusts the existing CAE solvers, there’s always a process to verify that actually the structure does what you think it does.
Aerodynamics, at least the coefficient of drag, is actually really good for this because you can’t cheat the air and it’s mostly obvious when you screw it up. Which isn’t true for flutter or the more structural details.
So, yeah, there is that risk, that they’ll get high on their own supply. But thankfully the management already thinks that the current crop of CAE solvers are magical and so the credentialed professional engineers already know how to fight that battle for a lot of the structural details. (The long-suffering assembly line folk who are trying to assemble the airplane properly are, of course, a different matter and have had a lot less leverage)
Although, I’d also propose that there’s a second risk, which is that the current validation process is oriented towards the ways with which the existing FEM models screw you up and it’s likely that when the large physics model screws you up, it won’t be the way FEM models do.
The regular old FEM based models can be quite misleading and when I had the chance to dig into them some years ago, it made me vaguely anxious. Except that nobody trusts the existing CAE solvers, there’s always a process to verify that actually the structure does what you think it does.
Aerodynamics, at least the coefficient of drag, is actually really good for this because you can’t cheat the air and it’s mostly obvious when you screw it up. Which isn’t true for flutter or the more structural details.
So, yeah, there is that risk, that they’ll get high on their own supply. But thankfully the management already thinks that the current crop of CAE solvers are magical and so the credentialed professional engineers already know how to fight that battle for a lot of the structural details. (The long-suffering assembly line folk who are trying to assemble the airplane properly are, of course, a different matter and have had a lot less leverage)
Although, I’d also propose that there’s a second risk, which is that the current validation process is oriented towards the ways with which the existing FEM models screw you up and it’s likely that when the large physics model screws you up, it won’t be the way FEM models do.