Honeywell Engines Systems & Services has written Fast Accurate Simulation of Turbine engines (FAST), a gas turbine system modeling program. Software design and development concepts, capabilities, and improved problem solving using FAST are discussed. Software design emphasis was placed on improving an engineer’s productivity, being easy to learn and use, adding new capability, and having low development and maintenance costs. Capability to replace all legacy modeling software, and make conversion of old models to the new model format simple was also required. The result was a significant increase in the productivity of the performance engineering staff in their efforts to support the design, development, and production, of gas turbine engines. FAST has provided the performance engineering staff with a simple but powerful input language and a robust numerical solver. With FAST, the user can perform preliminary engine design, model steady-state and transient off-design conditions, perform test data analysis, perform system modeling (multiple engine, installations, and engine/vehicle), connect FAST to other software, and generate customer programs quickly with auto-code features. FAST has permitted significant orders of magnitude increase in the volume of cycle analysis coupled with a 70% reduction in engineering staff and an 80% reduction in software development staff.
Modeling software design diversity
