Ascendance – Decarbonizing Air Transport

Air travel accounts for nearly 3% of global CO2 emissions, and with the increasing accessibility to aviation, that number is rising fast. Ascendance is aiming to bring permanent change to the aeronautical industry with hybrid-electric propulsion systems. It’s the long-haul flight to cleaner connections, and they’re doing it with the help of Cadence tools.

Ascendance aims to reduce CO2 emissions from helicopters by up to 80% using hybrid-electric propulsion systems and to emit four times less noise pollution than a regular helicopter. Their aircraft offers unrivaled performance in terms of range and turnaround time, with the range being two to three times greater than the competition and the turnaround time reduced to one-fifth. While Ascendance has two product lines of its own, it is commercializing its hybrid-propulsion technology to support the decarbonization of other air fleets.

It takes multiple design iterations to arrive at a technology that’s this innovative. To configure their aircraft, Ascendance needs to predict the aerodynamic performance of the various design iterations—something achieved through computational fluid dynamics (CFD)—but  also needs to provide efficiency, accuracy, speed, and flexibility.

The Cadence Fidelity CFD Platform checks all of those boxes. Combined with hardware from Oracle, Fidelity CFD has allowed Ascendance to increase its computational capacity by 4X, reduce its simulation times by 20X, and reduce its CO2 emissions by 10X. The Fidelity CFD Platform’s Pressure-Based Solver (PBS) allows a model to be run in many different ways, which helps predict the effects of propellers on the aerodynamics of the aircraft.

For Ascendance’s overall aircraft design team, Cadence tools have proven to be a game changer. Learn more about how Ascendance is decarbonizing air transport with the Fidelity CFD platform.

“Designed with Cadence” is a series of videos that showcases creative products and technologies that are accelerating industry innovation using Cadence tools and solutions. For more Designed with Cadence videos, check out the Cadence website and YouTube channel.