Advancing a Rocket’s Airbrake System Development Through Scalable CFD Simulations: A Collaboration Between Porto Space Team and Inductiva.AI

The Inductiva Team

Author

Porto Space Team

Author

July 11, 2025

Tags:

CFD SimulationsOpenFOAM simulationsComputational Fluid DynamicsAerospace engineeringEuRoC competitioncloud-based high-performance computingScientific ComputingScalable simulations
Earth seen from space at night, with glowing cities tracing the shape of the continents.

At Inductiva.AI, our mission is to empower engineers and scientists to solve complex physical problems at scale. Recently, we partnered with the Porto Space Team, a student rocketry group designing a novel airbrake system for their EuRoC competition rocket, a project requiring advanced CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) analyses over a wide transonic regime.

Here’s the Porto Space Team’s perspective on how the collaboration progressed:

The development of a novel airbrake system for our rocket competing in the EuRoC competition presented a significant technical and computational challenge: accurately characterizing aerodynamic behavior across a wide speed range, from Mach 0.1 to Mach 1.0. To meet this challenge, we extensively employed computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations with OpenFOAM, a critical tool for generating drag curves, evaluating flight stability, and iterating airbrake design and control strategies.

Overcoming Computational Constraints with Inductiva

Initially, simulations were performed on personal computers—adequate for preliminary testing but severely limited for complex, high-fidelity cases. For example, simulating merely 0.7 seconds of a large-eddy simulation (LES) scenario could take over 12 hours on a 4-core processor. A comprehensive 20-second flight simulation extended over several days, introducing delays that hindered iterative development.

Our collaboration with Inductiva proved transformative. By leveraging Inductiva’s cloud-based high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure, we accelerated simulations dramatically. 

This visualization was generated during the development of the airbrakes system. For this simulation, an LES (Large Eddy Simulation) turbulence model was used, aiming for a more detailed representation of vorticity and, overall, a richer visualization of airflow. Although this simulation does not yet produce results directly comparable to those from the RANS turbulence model, it represents an initial step toward a deeper study the team intends to pursue. With Inductiva’s support and the computational resources provided, running such high-cost simulations becomes feasible, turning this approach into a practical tool for the project.

The 20-second LES case that once took days now completes in under 7 hours. Additionally, Inductiva’s platform enables parallel execution of multiple simulation scenarios and automates our entire CFD workflow.

This scalability allowed us to conduct 12 complete case studies within a single month—previously infeasible given time constraints. Alongside computational power, Inductiva’s technical support was instrumental, assisting with solver configuration, resource optimization, and data pipeline management. This comprehensive approach improved data structuring, streamlined result sharing, and freed valuable time for physical interpretation and project refinement.

 

Impact on Engineering Workflow and Project Outcomes

Developing our first rocket airbrake system extended beyond a purely technical endeavor. It demanded rigorous resource management, rapid iteration cycles, and continuous validation under a competitive timeline. Accurate aerodynamic modeling was essential to ensuring system safety and performance.

Inductiva’s infrastructure and engineering collaboration enabled a qualitative and quantitative leap in our development process. Where we previously faced bottlenecks caused by slow simulations and manual data handling, we now benefit from accelerated runtimes, parallel case studies, automated workflows, and enhanced collaboration tools.

Key achievements facilitated by this partnership include:

  • Reducing CFD simulation runtimes from days to hours
  • Executing multiple aerodynamic scenarios concurrently to accelerate design iterations
  • Automating simulation pipelines, allowing more focus on analysis and decision-making
  • Improving data sharing and collaboration among team members

These advances directly contributed to validating control strategies and refining airbrake performance across multiple flight conditions—critical achievements within the tight deadlines of EuRoC competition preparation.

 

Mutual Innovation: Enhancing Inductiva Through Real-World Aerospace Use Cases

This collaboration has been mutually enriching. Beyond infrastructure, Inductiva provided deep technical support throughout development—helping optimize solver settings, compute resource allocation, and data workflows. This partnership enabled us to concentrate on extracting aerodynamic insights rather than computational logistics.

Simultaneously, Porto Space Team’s extensive CFD use in demanding aerospace contexts offered Inductiva valuable real-world feedback. Our insights have informed Inductiva’s ongoing platform development, guiding improvements such as:

  • Enhanced batch simulation orchestration
  • Improved OpenFOAM integration for LES turbulence modeling
  • Advanced data visualization and result-sharing capabilities
  • Workflow optimizations tailored for student engineering teams and research environments

This co-creation process strengthens both the quality of simulation outcomes for our project and the robustness and usability of Inductiva’s platform for future scientific and industrial users.

 

A Strategic Partnership Driving Future Aerospace Innovation

More than a technical service, Inductiva has become a strategic partner integral from the earliest stages of our project. Their infrastructure, expertise, and collaborative spirit have enabled us to scale both our ambitions and technical impact.

Our first rocket stands as a testament to what is achievable when engineering talent, innovative technology, and scalable computing infrastructure converge.

 

Porto Space Team
Student-led rocketry group pushing the frontier of aerospace innovation.
https://www.portospaceteam.pt/

Inductiva.AI
Cloud platform for scientific computing. Scalable CFD, Molecular Dynamics, Renewable Energy simulations and more.
https://inductiva.ai/

Check out our blog

Blog post banner, blue abstract background

From Supercomputer to Cloud: A New Era for OpenFOAM Simulations

Inductiva joined the 1st OpenFOAM HPC Challenge to test how cloud infrastructure stacks up against traditional HPC for large-scale CFD simulations. Running the DrivAer automotive benchmark, the team explored multiple hardware setups, hyperthreading choices, and domain decomposition strategies. The results? Inductiva’s flexible MPI clusters handled up to 768 partitions with impressive price-performance—even outperforming pricier hardware in some cases. For simulations below massive supercomputer scales, cloud HPC proves not only competitive but cost-effective, offering engineers and researchers agility without sacrificing speed. Curious how to fine-tune your OpenFOAM workloads in the cloud? Dive into the benchmarks and see what’s possible.

Future of AI blog post banner

The Future of AI is Physical: Simulation is Key

Everyone’s talking about LLMs, but the real next wave is AI for the physical world—AI that understands fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, and even quantum physics. From breakthroughs like DeepMind’s AlphaFold in protein folding to NVIDIA’s AI weather forecasting, industries from renewable energy to materials science are being transformed. But experimental data isn’t always enough; numerical simulations are crucial to generate high-quality datasets that power scientific AI. At Inductiva.AI, we’re offering a computational platform to democratize physics dataset generation, combining open-source simulators with cloud HPC, making it as easy as running a Python script. Explore how AI and scientific computing are converging—and what it means for the future of innovation.

Inductiva API v0.16 release

🔄 Real time Outputs, 💼 Smarter Projects, 🏷️ Metadata at scale, 🔒Private Simulators and two new ways to model the ocean 🌊 : What’s New in Inductiva.AI v0.16

We’re happy to share with our community Inductiva.AI v0.16, a powerful new release designed to help you organize simulations at scale, preserve context with metadata, and gain full control over your simulation environments. This version brings major upgrades to Project management, adds built-in metadata support, and now allows you to run your own private simulators securely. Plus, we’ve expanded our simulator catalog with two new engines for hydrodynamics and coastal modeling: OpenTelemac and Delft3D. Whether you're managing 10 or 10,000 simulations, this release helps you move faster, stay organized, and simulate anything — from river flows to molecular dynamics — on your terms.