Case Study: Vertical Aerospace achieves 4,300% CFD performance gains and 75% simulation cost reduction with Rescale

Vertical Aerospace Pioneers Urban Air Mobility with Cloud-First Strategy on Rescale

Vertical Aerospace, a Bristol‑based pioneer in urban eVTOL air taxis, faced the challenge of accelerating R&D while avoiding heavy on‑premises HPC capital spend. Seeking a cloud‑first approach to run compute‑intensive CFD, rotor‑dynamics and battery simulations more quickly and cost‑efficiently, the company evaluated and adopted Rescale’s ScaleX platform to modernize and scale its engineering workloads.

Using Rescale ScaleX (with Azure HPC hardware and Rescale Insights), Vertical Aerospace optimized architecture and license use to dramatically speed simulations and cut costs: up to a 4,300% performance increase for some CFD runs, 4x faster Ansys Fluent/CFX, 3.3x faster CHARM rotor simulations, a drop from five‑day design cycles to one day, and a 75% reduction in cost per job. Rescale’s platform helped Vertical Aerospace boost engineering productivity, accelerate commercialization and maintain rigorous governance and cost‑performance visibility.

Vertical Aerospace

Kurt Clement

Lead Aerodynamics Engineer