Streamlining Cross-Organizational Aircraft Development: Results from the AGILE Project

The research and innovation AGILE project developed the next generation of aircraft Multidisciplinary Design and Optimization processes, which target significant reductions in aircraft development costs and time to market, leading to more cost-effective and greener aircraft solutions. The high level objective is the reduction of the lead time of 40% with respect to the current state-of-the-art. 19 industry, research and academia partners from Europe, Canada and Russia developed solutions to cope with the challenges of collaborative design and optimization of complex products. In order to accelerate the deployment of large-scale, collaborative multidisciplinary design and optimization (MDO), a novel methodology, the so-called AGILE Paradigm, has been developed. Furthermore, the AGILE project has developed and released a set of open technologies enabling the implementation of the AGILE Paradigm approach. The collection of all the technologies constitutes AGILE Framework, which has been deployed for the design and the optimization of multiple aircraft configurations. This paper focuses on the application of the AGILE Paradigm on seven novel aircraft configurations, proving the achievement of the project’s objectives

Wind tunnel flutter testing on a highly flexible wing for aeroelastic validation in the transonic regime within the HMAE1 project

The aircraft manufacturer Embraer, the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the Netherlands Aerospace Centre (NLR) and German-Dutch Wind Tunnels (DNW) have tested an innovative highly flexible wing within an aeroelastic wind tunnel experiment in the transonic regime. The HMAE1 project was initiated by Embraer to test its numerical predictions for wing flutter under excessive wing deformations in the transonic regime. A highly elastic fiberglass wing-body pylon nacelle wind tunnel model (see Figure 1), which is able to deform extensively, was constructed for the experiment. The model was instrumented with a large number of pressure orifices, strain gauges, stereo pattern recognition (SPR) markers and accelerometers. The wing was tested from Ma = 0.4 to Ma = 0.9 for different angles of attack and stagnation pressures. The static and dynamic behavior of the wing model was monitored and a new method to analyze its eigenfrequencies and damping ratios was used. In the past, the large amounts of data acquired during such experiments could only be evaluated with a time lag. An efficient method developed by DLR now allows performing the data analysis in real time [1, 2]. As a result, it was possible during the test to identify exactly which safety margins remained before the onset of flutter and the resulting possible destruction of the model

On the optical quality of NCLR's 1 kW, 1 kHz XeCl excimer laser

The optical quality of NCLR's 1 kW, 1 kHz XeCl excimer laser has been investigated. Nearly diffraction limited beams can be obtained in short burst mode up to 1 kHz. Long burst mode operation is currently limited by the quality of the optics. The beam pointing variation is reduced to half the divergence angle and is found to be independent of the repetition rate of the laser system

INCLUDING AEROELASTIC TAILORING IN THE CONCEPTUAL DESIGN PROCESS OF A COMPOSITE STRUT-BASED WING

High aspect ratio strut braced aircraft can significantly reduce the induced drag. The inherent anisotropic behaviour of the composite material along with their weight saving potential can improve the performance of the aircraft during the flight. Thus, a composite strut braced aircraft is one of the promising candidates to achieve the targets set by European commission in Flightpath 2050 report. In this paper, multidisciplinary design analysis and optimization framework for strut braced aircrafts, is set-up involving tools provided by AGILE partners distributed worldwide. In the workflow, composite aeroelastic analysis and tailoring capability has been integrated with use of surrogate modelling. A design of experiment of the workflow with wing planform parameters as design variables is performed and a surrogate model is build. The optimization with an objective to reduce the fuel mass is performed using the surrogate of the workflow

Development of NCLR's 1-kW XeCl laser

For several years NCLR is working on a 1 kW, 1 kHz XeCl laser. Improvement of the beam quality at high power levels enabled us to do large-scale application experiments and industrial applications become feasible. The base for the good beam quality is a homogeneous discharge. It starts with a smooth gas flow from a classical flow loop. The combination of X-ray pre-ionization and the sophisticated spiker-sustainer circuit guarantees a stable discharge with a long optical pulse (250 ns). Due to the gentle discharge only weak shock waves are formed that are damped within 800 microseconds. An unstable resonator gives a nearly diffraction limited beam. We are now finding a market for this laser. Hole drilling is one of the most promising applications. We can drill holes of 10 to 100 micrometer diameter at a very fast production rate of up to 1000 holes per second. The holes can be drilled in many different materials: metals like aluminum, titanium, steel and nickel alloys, but also plastics, ceramics, glass and composites. The good results encouraged us to design a commercial version of the laser

Ground vibration testing and fem model updating of scaled Diana 2 glider model using accelerometer, gyro and strain measurements

A ground vibration test was conducted with a 1:3 scaled Diana 2 glider model where the modal parameters were estimated using the accelerometers, gyroscopes and strain gauges integrated in the test aircraft and validated using externally attached calibrated accelerometers and commercial software. These modal parameters were then used to update a FEM model of the glider together with static load tests and component mass measurements. The goal for this updated and fitted FEM model is then to build an aeroelastic model for flexible aircraft flight dynamics simulator.Aerospace Structures & Computational MechanicsControl & Simulatio