Recent Advances in Collaborative Gradient-Based MDO for Sustainable Aircraft Design

Abstract

Over the past decade the German Aerospace Center (DLR) has developed an integrated, high-fidelity Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) capability focused on realistic aircraft design challenges. This capability couples adjoint-enabled computational fluid dynamics (CFD), structural finite-element methods, loads analysis and sizing modules, and a tool for evaluating gas turbine engine performance with overall aircraft design and optimization frameworks in an HPC-ready workflow. Key methodological thrusts include adjoint-based gradient computation, multi-fidelity and reduced-order modeling to control computational cost, and modular workflow orchestration. The resulting toolchain supports tightly coupled aero-structural analyses, global aero-structural wing optimizations, gust-load alleviation studies, adaptive wing technologies based on multifunctional control surfaces, aeroelastic tailoring, laminar wing design, as well as multi-objective and multi-point optimization, thus serving as an enabling technology for sustainable aviation. It supports aircraft designs that are aerodynamically cleaner, structurally lighter, more resilient to maneuver and gust loads, and efficiently developed. The talk summarizes the software and numerical building blocks, the principal MDO formulations used, benchmark and application cases, and open research challenges for scaling high-fidelity MDO toward full-aircraft design and certification-relevant studies. It will also showcase different sustainable aircraft design studies exploiting this capability, including high-aspect-ratio wing (HARW) concepts, a regional turboprop-aircraft concept with hybrid-electric distributed propulsion, a hydrogen-powered short/medium-haul airliner featuring an integrated fuselage and tail optimized for liquid-hydrogen storage and systems integration, and a short and medium range aircraft configuration with LH2-powered turbofan engine, as well as a HARW natural laminar flow business jet. Collectively, these advances illustrate that high-fidelity, adjoint-driven MDO is a key enabler for developing the next generation of ultra-efficient, climate-aligned aircraft configurations