High-Fidelity Multidisciplinary Design Trade Study of Short-Medium Range Aircraft with High Aspect-Ratio Wing

Abstract

Decarbonizing the air transport requires efficient tools that can robustly guide aircraft designers towards improved and fuel-efficient designs. Multidisciplinary design analysis and optimization (MDA/MDO) methods are expected to be key technologies for accelerating the design process and for coming up with less conventional designs, that perform better or can accommodate environment-friendly fuel. Being a promising candidate to face the aforementioned challenges, aircraft configurations with high aspect-ratio wings (HARW) are currently gaining increasing attention at the industry. Such airframe technologies are expected to improve the aircraft efficiency and significantly reduce fuel burn and, therefore, CO2 and NOX emissions. Airframes with HARWs are, however, expected to be highly flexible and, hence, their design requires tighter cooperation among the airframe aerodynamics and structure experts. Here reliable MDA and MDO, based on high-fidelity numerical models, can play a vital role in supporting the disciplinary experts to design efficient aircraft. The target of this study is to explore the design space of the HARW short-medium range aircraft configuration; DLR-F25 , via high-fidelity MDA and MDO chains. After defining the main set of design and trade parameters for the configuration at hand, MDA and MDO tools will be used to perform multidisciplinary trade studies. The set of design and trade parameters investigated here will include outer shape parameters as well as structure design parameters, defining the inner topology of the wing box structure. In addition to the direct benefit of investigating the different trades, the output of such a study will assist the designer in understanding the main design parameters that drive the defined figure of merit.