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 are required to reliably estimate the feasibility of a given new design concept. Analysis tools and results are provided by highly specialized groups of experts, possibly from different organizations. In the AGILE (aircraft 3rd generation MDO for innovative collaboration of heterogeneous teams of experts) project, new approaches to setting up cross-organizational collaborative aircraft design optimization workflows have been investigated, including the employment of common parametric aircraft configuration schema as a central common data schema and the provision of disciplinary analysis competences as callable services. Following this paradigm, the present paper details a distributed workflow to perform an aero-structural design optimization of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) design. Taking advantage of disciplinary capabilities provided by several partners based in various locations across Europe, an integrated design workflow including a distributed and tightly coupled aero-structural analysis loop has been assembled using the process integration and design optimization system remote component environment developed at the German Aerospace Center. To enable the necessary load and displacement transfer between non-matching disciplinary meshes, a versatile and lightweight algorithm using radial basis functions has furthermore been implemented. The functionality of the workflow is demonstrated by performing the optimization on the baseline configuration of the UAV.