Optimenga 777, resident of the IT cluster, has received the first tranche of grant funding from the Skolkovo Foundation for development of an advanced software for aerodynamic design of airplane wings.
Sergey Peygin, general director of Optimenga 777 and his partner, the company’s financial director Vladimir Kolpakov, spoke about their cutting edge software Optimenga_Aero, the history of the company and future plans.
Sergey Vladimirovich, please tell us about your software, what are its characteristic features?
Sergey Peygin:
Software Optimenga_Aero is an innovative technological product for aircraft builders. It was developed on the back of their requirement for mathematical modeling and aerodynamic design. But it also takes these processes to a new level, as it places them in terms of effectiveness on the same level as products which use mathematical modeling to solve problems (when the object is defined and we want to know its properties). Used in applied aerodynamics, this software helps to optimally shape the design of the wing. In this case, the product allows to speedup the design process, drastically decreasing all sorts of costs at the stage of airplane design, and conduct analysis of wing aerodynamics in a full range of flight conditions.
Sergey Peygin, general director
What is the economic impact of using your product?
Of course, we compared our solutions with the best analogues globally. For example, we beat “Boing” in all parameters which, by the way, the company had acknowledged. It took them 50 days to solve a similar task – we needed only 27 hours. This means that we can considerably decrease costs. Statistics of American airplane builders show that the process of aerodynamic design of wings for a new civil plane takes about 1.5-2 years in the USA, depending on the type of airplane. There are up to 200 specialists participating in the process, while financial costs can amount to USD 150-200 million. We think, in the future this figure can be decreased to USD 10-15 million while the timeframe can be decreased to 1.5-2 months. Our product received the highest praise at the scientific-technical council “OAK” where the representative of “Civil Airplanes of Sukhoy” made the announcement for everyone to hear. With the help of our product they managed to decrease resistance of the wing by 5% - this is a big amount, equivalent to a considerable increase in payload.
Vladimir Kolpakov:
The ways of thinking and approaches in this project are the main challenge: the aviation industry as you know is quite conservative when it comes to implementation of innovative methods, often they prefer not to improve something which already works well. And our product is in certain sense revolutionary, it is a new approach, a new way to organize working processes, and we expect that new people will help promote Optimenga_Aero in the industry, who we will show how to use the product.
Vladimir Kolpakov
Do you cooperate with educational institutions?
For implementation of such new technologies in the industry, we will undoubtedly need people who can work with such software products. Presently we are cooperating with the Department of Physics and Technology of the Tomsk State University, with the Tomsk R&D institute of applied mathematics and mechanics. It is necessary to prepare people in advance to work with this software, who then can work with the customer.
Our own student life is connected to Tomsk University. Vladimir Kolpakov and I studied together, both graduated from the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics in Tomsk. He then went into business, and then took up philosophy, and I stayed in science. Later fate separated us and I went to work in Israel by invitation of aircraft builders in this country. Optimenga was actually established in Israel at the end of 2007. And in 2011 we decided to come back to Russia being one of the most attractive markets where special focus is given on the development of the aviation industry on the one hand, and where there are such projects as Skolkovo on the other. In Russia we met Vladimir again who became our co-investor. And here we also attracted another co-investor whom we know from our student years, Vladimir Kovalenko.
Having registered in Moscow at the end of 2011, in June 2012 we applied for the resident status and by the end of July already received positive feedback and became a Skolkovo resident. In September we already applied for a grant. I want to underline that notwithstanding the fact that on certain issues we had to wait for an answer, the overall impression from the grant funding process at Skolkovo is quite positive. The process is well organized, issues are solved in a expedient and constructive way. And the most important fact is that we achieved results, receiving financing for our project.
Russia and Skolkovo helped you to establish a company, and how about the work abroad, how did it enhance your experience?
First of all, in Israel I met an important member of our project, Boris Epstein. He is a very important person in our business. Boris created MGAERO, a well known software globally for the calculation of complex configurations in the frameworks of Euler equation solution in Cartesian coordinate systems. Now this software is sold on the market by an American company Analytical Method Incorporated (AMI) and has been acquired by the world’s largest aviation corporations: it has more than 150 installations with sales of USD 50 million. The author of this famous product is now a member of our team. He has experience both in creation and successful commercialization of such type of products.
Sergey Vladimirovich, it’s time to ask the question about future plans and prospects.
S. Peygin:
So, we have received funding, a Skolkovo grant, and are continue to work on the product to which we have dedicated ourselves. The next task is to make an alpha version of our software for the optimization of the aerodynamic design of wings with the presence of fuselage. For this we are checking the pilot version of our product. And we have already included the biggest Russian aviation construction companies in the process: “Irkut”, “Civil Airplanes of Sukhoy”, “OAK – Transportation Airplanes”. Fortunately, everything is great at this point. These companies have already understood for themselves that whatever we say is absolutely true. Optimenga has received a lot of positive feedback from these key players. And most importantly: we have seen for ourselves that we are moving in an absolutely right direction. Our strategic plans include among other things, making this software adaptive, covering other sectors in mechanical engineering.