A challenge for the scientific community is to adapt to and exploit the trend
towards greater multidisciplinary focus in research and technology. This work is
concerned with multi-disciplinary design for whole aircraft configuration,
including aero performance and financial considerations jointly for an aircraft
program. A Multi-Disciplinary (MD) approach is required to increase the
robustness of the preliminary design data and to realise the overall aircraft
performance objectives within the required timescales. A pre-requisite for such
an approach is the existence of efficient and fully integrated processes.
For this purpose an automatic aero high-speed analysis framework has been
developed and integrated using a commercial integration/building environment.
Starting from the geometry input, it automatically generates aero data for loads
in a timescale consistent with level requirement, which can afterwards be
integrated into the overall multi-disciplinary process.
A 3D Aero-solution chain has been implemented as a high-speed aerodynamic
evaluation capability, and although there is not yet a complementary fully
automated Aerodynamic design process, two integrated systems to perform
multi-objective optimisation have been developed using different optimisation
approaches.
In addition to achieving good aircraft performance, reducing cost may be
essential for manufacturer survival in today's competitive market. There is thus
a strong need to understand the cost associated with different competing
concepts and this could be addressed by incorporating cost estimation in the
design process along with other analyses to achieve economic and efficient
aircraft. For this reason a pre-existing cost model has been examined, tested,
improved, and new features added. Afterwards, the cost suite has been
integrated using an integration framework and automatically linked with external
domains, providing a capability to take input from other domain tool sets. In this
way the cost model could be implemented in a multi-disciplinary process
allowing a trade-off between weight, aero performance and cost. Additionally,
studies have been performed that link aerodynamic characteristics with cost
figures and reinforce the importance of considering aerodynamic, structural and
cost disciplines simultaneously. The proposed work therefore offers a strong
basis for further development. The modularity of the aero optimisation
framework already allows the application of such techniques to real engineering
test cases, and, in future, could be combined with the 3D aero solution chain
developed. In order to further reduce design wall-clock time the present multi-
level parallelisation could also be deployed within a more rapid multi-fidelity
approach. Finally the 3D aero-solution chain could be improved by directly
incorporating a module to generate aero data for performance, and linking this
to the cost suite informed by the same geometrical variables.Engineering and Physical Sciences (EPSRC)PhD in Aerospac
