Five on Friday: Flexcompute, Regent and Arrive AI
Last week Joby deepened its partnership with high-performance simulation software specialist Flexcompute.
The partnership was revealed back in March when Joby was announced amongst the early adopters of Flexcompute’s Flow360 software, accelerated by Nvidia’s Blackwell – a next-generation graphics processor unit (GPU) architecture that makes Flow360 up to 100x faster, reports suggest.
The Californian eVTOL developer is one of a growing list of advanced aerospace companies using Flexcompute’s software, including Wisk, Beta, Vertical, JetZero and Dufour Aerospace.
Flexcompute President Vera Yang said: “With Flow360, we enable Joby to run high-fidelity simulations to accelerate the optimisation of aerodynamics and acoustics across a wide flight envelope.”
At face value the announcement makes sense, but raises the question, where does Flow360 fit amongst the simulation software programmes Joby has already used?
The eVTOL developer has made use of Simcenter STAR-CCM+ – part of Siemens Xcelerator platform – for running computational fluid dynamics simulations so it can reduce manufacturing cycles with the aim of accelerating market entry.
Joby, alongside fellow developers such as Archer and Wisk, also uses NASA’s Overflow. This computer code performs calculations to predict fluid flows such as air, and the pressures, forces, moments and power requirements that come from the aircraft. As fluid flows contribute to noise, Overflow can help engineers design quieter aircraft.
Sources have suggested Joby may be anxious to attract more investment following the latest raises by Archer bringing the latter’s total cash to about $2.8bn. To date, Joby is thought to have raised about $2.4bn. If that is true, we can expect to see more announcements coming out in the near future.
However, leveraging Flow360 – backed by Nvidia’s Blackwell – means Joby can dramatically shorten design cycles and simulate acoustics in hours not days. This represents a big step-change in design speed, evidenced by the growing list of companies signing up to use the software.
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