We are glad to present a new thesis featuring RBF Morph software, developed by Davide Zambon at Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia during the academic year 2024/2025. The thesis, titled “Acceleration of the Aerodynamic Design Workflow: A Plugin for Alias Based on Radial Basis Functions,” investigates the integration of Radial Basis Functions within Autodesk Alias to accelerate the aerodynamic design workflow. The work focuses on a plugin capable of capturing geometric modifications applied to NURBS surfaces in Alias and transferring them directly to the CFD mesh through RBF-based morphing, thus avoiding the need for complete CFD re-simulations, which are typically computationally expensive and time-consuming.

The methodology relies on sensitivity data derived from adjoint CFD solvers, allowing the system to estimate the aerodynamic impact of local geometric variations in near real time. By maintaining mesh topology and coherently propagating deformations across all nodes, the plugin ensures full compatibility between CAD modifications and the precomputed simulation fields. This creates a streamlined loop between design and aerodynamic evaluation, reducing iteration times and improving the efficiency of early-stage development.

The thesis was supervised by Prof. Nicola Prezza, with the collaboration of Prof. Marco Evangelos Biancolini and Dott. Marco Camponeschi. The work demonstrates how RBF Morph technology can be effectively integrated within industrial CAD environments to enhance shape optimization workflows and provide rapid aerodynamic performance assessment during design activities.

You can read the full thesis here.