Laboratories
Fluid Mechanics
By offering ever more efficient transportation, flying vehicles contribute to improve daily life. But they also contribute to pollution and noise. To limit pollution and noise (which is acoustic pollution) requires designing aircraft wings and helicopter wings which are increasingly efficient and quiet, as well as safer in crucial areas such as ice build-up. To achieve this requires knowledge and tools in the fields of physical modeling and theoretical-digital methods, databases and super computers, the ability to simulate phenomena and equipment to verify them, all in service of its goals.
All this is the work of the Fluid Mechanics unit, with activities and studies which – like for all other areas of CIRA research – will eventually impact everyday life, from meteorology to medicine, from reducing pollution to producing clean energy with more efficient wind turbines.
Aerospace Structures and Materials
Lighter yet stronger structures, new systems to join similar or dissimilar materials, increasingly fast and precise manufacturing technologies: such are the most representative challenges tackled by the CIRA unit that works on the development of new technologies and innovative materials. Today the market requires a strong reduction in manufacturing costs and in the time to turn ideas into saleable products, without of course forgetting very high safety levels. This makes research and development in the field of advanced technologies and materials crucial for the future of industry, both aerospace and general. The space race, which brought mankind to the Moon, has already amply proved the decisive impact of the search for new technologies and new materials not just in furthering space exploration but in daily life. Despite having been created solely to meet requirements drawn up decades ago by the aerospace industry, materials such as Teflon® and fabrics such as Gore-Tex® are now in widespread use in very different fields.
USV Flying Labs
Future shuttles will be required to reenter the atmosphere making more complex maneuvers than those typical of first-generation American shuttles, being capable of longer glides and handling much more like an airplane. This will allow them, among other things, to land on a much broader range of runways, making them more versatile spacecraft.
The CIRA Unmanned Space Vehicles (USV) program aims to develop enabling technologies for future space access and reentry systems and trans-atmospheric vehicles (aerospaceplanes), divided into multiple phases and carried out by means of extremely sophisticated flying labs.
