Aircraft System and Product Development: Teaching the Conceptual Phase

This paper reports the first offering of a graduate level subject covering the conceptual phase of aircraft product development. The output of the conceptual phase is a system level specification that usually serves as the input for a traditional undergraduate capstone subject on aircraft design. Of critical importance in the conceptual phase is addressing the business case for the candidate product. The conceptual phase spans a much wider range of topics than the technical issues which dominate preliminary design. These include user needs, investment and business requirements, market analysis, operational issues, exogenous constraints (certification, regulation, political, etc.), as well as engineering and manufacturing requirements. Students in the subject were required to Prepare for the Board of Directors of a large aerospace company a compelling business case and specification for a large jet transport product. Three student teams produced original responses to the challenge and have reported their findings in a companion AIAA paper. This paper addresses the pedagogical approaches and outcomes. These encompass the use of distance learning technology and techniques for several off-campus practicing engineering students. Overall, the outcome was very gratifying. The class will be offered in the spring of 2001, focusing on a supersonic business jet

Blended wing body with boundary layer ingestion conceptual design in a multidisciplinary design analysis optimization environment

This paper introduces the GENUS multidisciplinary concept level aircraft design and analysis environment developed by Cranfield University in recent years and it has been applied to the conceptual design of blended wing body (BWB) aircraft. Analytical disciplines include a variety of low-to-medium fidelity, physics-based and empirical methods, and aerodynamic analysis of high-order panel method. Boundary layer ingestion (BLI), as a special module, has been incorporated into the aerodynamic and propulsion analysis. The results of the Cranfield BW-11 are presented. In the highly-constrained design space, a type of highly fuel- efficient BWB concept can be studied, and the advantages of the BLI concept can also be explored based on this framework

Combined Aerostructural Wing and High-Lift System Optimization

A coupled-adjoint aerostrutctural wing optimization tool has been modified to include the optimization of high-lift devices from the start of the optimization process. The aerostructural tool couples a quasi-three-dimensional method with a finite beam element model. In this paper, the quasi-three-dimensional method is modified using a α method of Van Dam to enable high-lift aerodynamic analysis..