Conceptual multidisciplinary design via a multi-objective multi-fidelity optimisation method.

Air travel demand and the associated fuel emissions are expected to keep increasing in the following decades, forcing the aerospace industry to find ways to revolutionise the design process to achieve step-like performance improvements and emission reduction goals. A promising approach towards that goal is multidisciplinary design. To maximise the benefits, interdisciplinary synergies have to be investigated early in the design process. Efficient multidisciplinary optimisation tools are required to reliably identify a set of promising design directions to support engineering decision making towards the new generation of aircraft. To support these needs, a novel optimisation methodology is proposed aiming in exploiting multidisciplinary trends in the conceptual stage, exploring the design space and providing a pareto set of optimum configurations in the minimum cost possible. This is achieved by a combination of the expected improvement surrogate based optimisation plan, a novel Kriging modification to allow the use of multi-fidelity tools and a multi-objective sub-optimisation process infill formulation implemented within an multidisciplinary design optimisation architecture. A series of analytical test cases were initially used to develop the methodology and examine its performance under a set of criteria like global optimality, computational efficiency and dimensionality scaling. These were followed by two industrially relevant aerodynamic design cases, the RAE2822 transonic airfoil and the GARTEUR high lift configuration, investigating the effect of the constraint handling methods and the low fidelity tool. The cost reductions and exploration characteristics achieved by the method were quantified in realistic unconstrained, constrained and multi-objective problems. Finally, an aerostructural optimisation study of the NASA Common Research Model was used as a representative of a complex multidisciplinary design problem. The results demonstrate the framework’s capabilities in industrial problems, showing improved results and design space exploration but with lower costs than similarly oriented methods. The effect of the multidisciplinary architecture was also examined

THE AIRCRAFT MAINTENANCE ENGINEER COMPETENCE WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF AVIATION SAFETY REGULATIONS

This thesis is intended to serve as a guide for operation of a flight safety function within international safety organizations. This paper is specifically focused on the impact of European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) Regulations as they are strongly applied to Aircraft Maintenance. The paper is intended on responsibilities for releasing Aircraft Maintenance Engineer License to sign off aircraft for flight. It also includes guidance to competency requirements of the Aircraft Maintenance Engineer

The control system of the ATLAS/TileCal

Tese de doutoramento, Física (Física), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2011TileCal is the hadronic calorimeter of the ATLAS detector that is operating at CERN. The main task of the TileCal Detector Control System (DCS) is to enable the coherent and safe operation of the detector. All actions initiated by the operator and all errors, warnings, and alarms concerning the hardware of the detector are handled by DCS. The logical structure of the TileCal DCS is subdivided in functional blocks, following a functional criteria, structured in a tree-like way where all the functional blocks can run autonomously. The system comprises the following functional blocks: the low voltage power supplies (LVPS), the high voltage (HV) and the cooling of the electronics. We report the result of four years of work dedicated to the TileCal DCS design, development, installation, testes and its integration into ATLAS detector operation. Also reported is the study done for the optimization validation of the Local Hadronic Calibration using the data from the combined test-beam in the year 2004 at CERN. The combined test-beamconsisted on exposing a fully instrumented slice of the ATLAS detector to particle beams fromthe SPS (Super Proton Synchrotron). The results of themeasurements of the response of the hadronic Tile calorimeter to pionswith energy in the range 2 to 230 GeV using the Local Hadron Calibration schema are reported. The linearity and the resolution of the calorimeter were determined and compared to previous results and to the predictions of a simulation program using the toolkit Geant4.Fundação da Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT); LIP (SFRH / BD / 19076 / 2004), União Europeia - QREN/POHP e QREN/COMPETE