A joint team from Haiqu and Quanscient has demonstrated the execution of quantum Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) algorithms on currently available trapped-ion devices, specifically IonQ hardware accessed via Amazon Braket. This collaboration, which were finalists in the Airbus and BMW Quantum Mobility Challenge in 2024, explores quantum computing’s potential to address the limits of classical computing in modeling continuum physics on high-resolution grids.
The team utilized Quanscient’s Quantum Lattice Boltzmann Method (QLBM) algorithms to map classical partial differential equations (PDEs) to quantum computation. Haiqu’s middleware provided application-agnostic execution and error-mitigation tools, enabling the execution of deep circuits. The collaboration performed three steps of QLBM time evolution for the two-dimensional advection-diffusion equation (ADE) on lattices up to 64×64 using 16 qubits on the IonQ Aria 1 QPU, accessed via Amazon Braket. This marked the first end-to-end execution of multiple QLBM steps on quantum hardware for this scale. Quanscient also performed full QLBM simulations of a NACA0012 airfoil benchmark on an ideal noiseless quantum simulator, using 23 qubits for a 256×256 spatial grid for 25,000 steps, indicating viability for industrially relevant benchmarks as quantum devices improve.
This work highlights the synergy between domain-specific algorithm development (by Quanscient), tailored quantum middleware and execution tools (by Haiqu), and computational infrastructure (provided by AWS). QLBM offers logarithmic scaling of qubits required with lattice size and logarithmic growth in quantum gate requirements per time step, potentially providing algorithmic advantages in speed and scale. The collaboration demonstrates a step toward applying quantum computing to address real-world engineering challenges in the automotive and aerospace industries, particularly in areas like airplane design simulations.
Read more about this collaboration on the AWS Quantum Technologies Blog here and Haiqu’s LinkedIn post here.
July 17, 2025
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