Integration Aspects of the Collaborative Aero-Structural Design of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Abstract

Overall aircraft design is a complex multidisciplinary process, which requires knowledge from many different fields such as structures, aerodynamics, systems and propulsion. For unconventional configurations lacking an empirical knowledge base, higher fidelity physics-based methods provided by highly specialized Groups of experts are required to reliably estimate the feasibility of a new design concept. Following this premise, a collaborative workflow to perform an aero-structural design optimization of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) design has been established as part of the AGILE project [1]. The disciplinary competences are provided by several partners based in various locations across Europe. Whereas the structural expertise is provided by Airbus Defence and Space, the CFD competence is provided by Airinnova and CFS Engineering, who also perform the analysis. The missing interfaces between the individual partners, as well as the overall integration are handled by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of System Architectures in Aeronautics, which also contributes the Common Parametric Aircraft Configuration Schema (CPACS) [2, 3], the common source data structure for the model generation. This paper details the integration tasks performed at DLR. An algorithm for load and displacement transfer between non-matching meshes has been implemented using radial basis functions [4, 5]. Furthermore, an executable workflow has been assembled using the Remote Component Environment (RCE) [6, 7] developed at DLR, which allows each partner to expose their competence as a callable service. The functionality of the workflow is demonstrated by performing the optimization on a set of design variations of the baseline configuration of the UAV.