Automated knowledge-based cabin design and evaluation within a preliminary aircraft design loop

Kurzfassung

Aircraft manufacturers and airlines are developing new, more efficient, and individually adaptable aircraft configurations to meet the growing demand for sustainable and affordable air transport. While established overall aircraft design processes are highly effective for conventional configurations, they frequently rely on handbook methods and empirical data during the conceptual and preliminary design phases. However, when integrating disruptive cabin concepts and novel technologies, these conventional methods may not fully capture the resulting complexities. This can lead to suboptimal integration and increased development efforts in subsequent design stages. This paper presents a digital design process that integrates detailed cabin and structural design data into overall aircraft design to support disciplinary analyses in the early design phase, thereby enabling collaborative conceptual and preliminary aircraft design to assess disruptive concepts and technologies at the overall aircraft level. To achieve this, novel knowledge-based methods are developed to automatically generate a wide range of conventional and disruptive cabin and structural designs based on top-level aircraft requirements, certification guidelines for passenger aircraft, and the initial geometry from conceptual design. These methods are integrated into a digital multidisciplinary design process to feed back key information, such as cabin dimensions, installation space availability and mass distributions, into the conceptual design. A case study based on a current research configuration provides a proof of concept that incorporating this additional information in early design phases enables a more comprehensive assessment of disruptive concepts and technologies and enhances the evaluation of cabin configurability at the overall aircraft level as installation space requirements and mass distributions for different cabin concepts can be added to the existing aircraft design processes.