PROMUVAL (G4MA-CT-2002-00022) is a 16 month project co-funded by the 5th Framework Programme of the European Community - managed by the European Commission - and forms part of the Competitive and Sustainable Growth (GROWTH) Programme.

There is a strategic interest in Europe for designing new safer, quieter and cleaner products in Aeronautics and Aerospace industries meeting society's needs and ensuring competitiveness. Innovative solutions to challenges will rely mainly on the credibility of numerical tools for multidisciplinary design problems.

The affordable in time and cost product designed in an industrial multidisciplinary environment requires confident knowledge of the quality of main codes used in design. Despite recent advances in modeling, experimental and computational methodologies there is still a lack of confidence in the coupling and integration of affordable industrial software for multidisciplinary analysis and design.

Numerous solvers and optimisation tools have been developed and used until recently and have proven to be of significant value in many industrial applications, when not treating explicitly the coupling due to the multidisciplinary effects. Indeed, the correct use of such single discipline codes is limited to specific range of applications. Despite recent efforts, there is still a lack of information on methods, codes and experiments related to coupled multidisciplinary problems in aeronautics engineering, involving two or more different fields (such as fluid/structure, fluid/acoustics, fluid/heat transfer, structure/acoustics, pollution flows, etc.).

The gap of technology to fill for mastering Multidisciplinary Validation requires new models and software taking into account multi physics and multi-scale coupling effects. Methodologies in design have also to adjust to new interactions between specialists in different disciplines in a concurrent engineering procedure.

Multidisciplinary Validation has to face modelisation limits and requires knowledge of experimental and numerical limits with "just needed" discretization size and iterations. A considerable effort at the European level has to be organized for surveying and collecting experimental, theoretical and numerical data originating from several disciplines as a necessary step towards proposing new methods and procedures.