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TechnoSoft has developed and released an air vehicle design engineering environment in collaboration with AFRL, NASA and major aerospace industries. The Adaptive Modeling Rapid Air Vehicle Engineering (AMRaven) environment is a generative modeling environment enabling the integrated design and analysis of air vehicles. AMRaven is built on the AML object-oriented framework incorporating a custom design environment with a suite of modeling features that support the rapid design and configuration of air vehicles. The generation of detailed analysis models for coupled aerodynamic and structural analysis is fully automated. Unique to the AMRaven framework is a feature-based design environment that incorporates a set of custom components such as pods, wings, and control surfaces for outer mold line (OML) design and spars, ribs, and bulkheads for substructure layout.

This paper describes the development of an analytical tool for the design automation of the temperature blend door mechanism in an automotive HVAC system. The function of the blend door is to control the temperature of the air blown into the cabin interior by regulating the mix of air passing through the heater core. The objective in the design process is to achieve a prescribed function of temperature with respect to control position at the instrument panel. The control effort to effect the desired temperature change is also another important consideration for customer satisfaction. The current design process is empirical in nature and relies on laboratory and vehicle testing with prototypes. The process is also iterative in nature and may continue until the end of the overall design cycle of the complete air handling subsystem. A parametric feature-based computer model, described subsequently in detail, allows for virtual prototyping of the blend door control mechanism.