Aerostructural modeling for preliminary aircraft design

In order to reduce aircraft fuel consumption and to improve the reliability of the design process, multi-disciplinary optimization is nowadays carried out during the preliminary design stage. Because there is a strong coupling between the flow and the aircraft structure, and because new composite materials have anisotropic directional mechanical properties, these optimization calculations must model the aeroelastic behavior of the aircraft. Since there is a high degree of design freedom during the early stages, the optimization problem must be formulated such that its cost does not scale with the number of design variables. 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.

This seminar presents the development of an aerostructural optimization framework suitable for preliminary aircraft design. Firstly, various optimization approaches and aerodynamic modeling techniques will be briefly reviewed. Then, the methods appropriate for preliminary design will be retained and described. In particular, the steady transonic flow solver DART, and the unsteady compressible panel method SDPM will be presented. The validity of these codes will then be demonstrated through analysis and optimization cases. Finally, key points will be highlighted and suggestions for future work will be given as a conclusion.