Beneficiary name: eCon Engineering Kft. (consortium members: University of Pannonia, Bitotron Kft.)

Project title: Preliminary design system of composite rotating blades for aerospace and wind turbine applications

The amount of aid contracted: HUF 452 356 892

Project content: The R&D project led by a consortium of Econ Engineering, University of Pannonia and Bitotron Kft. aims to establish an automated preliminary design system that can investigate any propeller designs from aerodynamical and coupled structural aspects in an efficient and quick manner without compromising accuracy. By using this software the relevant industrial partners (aerospace and wind turbine industry) can iterate and design the geometry and the ply layup of the target rotating blade (e.g. airfoil shape and orientation along span) without the need for the deep knowledge of either the underlying complex simulation techniques or the use of the simulation software. The two main innovations embedded in the software are the 3D corrected Virtual Blade Model (VBM) supported by Machine Learning (ML) that assists reducing the required blade CFD simulation time drastically by keeping accuracy comparable to an explicite 3D simulation; the other is the numerical evaluation technique of the resistance against fatigue of composite layers. Such evaluation method is not available in any commercial Finite Element software. The primary target of this project is the focussed product development, thus, the user application is expected to be launched to market right after the project closure in the rollout phase (from 2026 Q4). With the aid of this software product the propeller development time  (and thus, the time to market) can be significantly reduced. In addition, by using this software, the numerical simulation based product development becomes available for such companies that do not possess the necessary deep technical knowledge or software environment. In a long term additional features are planned to be built in such as automated geometry and ply layup optimization os surrogate damage model generation for on-site health monitoring.

Project completion date: 31.08.2026

Project identification number: 2023-1.1.1-PIACI_FÓKUSZ-2024-00002