FAST FULL POTENTIAL BASED AEROSTRUCTURAL OPTIMIZATION CALCULATIONS FOR PRELIMINARY AIRCRAFT DESIGN

In order to reduce aircraft fuel consumption and to improve the reliability of the design process, multidisciplinary optimization is nowadays carried out during the preliminary design stage. These optimization calculations must model the aeroelastic behavior of the aircraft in order to be effective and to take full advantage of composite materials. Since many design variables are involved during the early stages, the optimization problem is usually solved using the adjoint method. Moreover, the fluid model and the associated numerical simulation method must be selected with care, as they are the main contributors to the overall computational cost. In the present work, an open-source full potential solver with discrete adjoint capability is integrated in a multidisciplinary optimization framework. Aerodynamic and aerostructural optimization calculations are subsequently carried out on typical benchmark cases to illustrate the methodology. Overall, the results show that the adjoint nonlinear potential formulation yields optimized wing shapes and structures at very low computational cost. The next steps consist in improving the problem formulation, by considering full aircraft configurations along with more realistic design variables, constraints and objective functions, and in improving the aerodynamic model by including viscous effects.