Case Study: Firefly Aerospace achieves faster, lower-cost rocket engine design with Nimbix

Firefly Aerospace Partners With Nimbix to Design High-quality, Cost-efficient Engine Components for Its Space Launch Vehicles

Firefly Aerospace, a developer of small launch vehicles, needed far more computing power and flexibility to model and refine rocket engine components, especially the nozzle extension for its Lightning engine. Their previous HPC provider made it difficult to rapidly iterate on complex CFD and structural simulations, slowing design work for parts that must withstand extreme heat and pressure during launch. Firefly turned to Nimbix and its cloud HPC infrastructure to support simulations using tools like Ansys CFX, Ansys Fluent, Ansys Mechanical, and NASA codes.

With Nimbix, Firefly gained on-demand access to scalable HPC resources, letting the team run large simulation jobs whenever needed with minimal wait time. This accelerated design iterations from days to hours, enabled multiple simulations in parallel, and helped an analyst complete 15 iterations in one week to optimize a film-cooling baffle. The result was a more reliable and manufacturable design that saved hundreds of thousands of dollars per engine, while reducing overall development time and cost.

Firefly Aerospace

David McKinnon

Subject Matter Expert