Structural Concepts of Passenger Driven Aircraft

Abstract

Contrary to the common procedure of designing the fuselage structure first and then integrating the cabin, the Passenger Driven Aircraft (PDA) Concept is tracking an innovative inside-out approach. That means, with the focus on the passengers’ needs, the cabin layout, i.e. “H-Cylinder”, “V-Cylinder”, and “V-Lens” designs, marks the starting point of the structural fuselage design. Based on these PDA cabin layouts suitable structural fuselage concepts have been developed. Parametric CAD models were used addressing the aero-driven single bubble / elliptical shape and structure-driven quadruple bubble configurations. Based on these models each of the partners developed their solutions to serve as an input for the Joint Probabilistic Decision Making (JPDM) process. “H-Cylinder” and “V-Cylinder” layouts revealed to be the most interesting variants for reasons of significance and were examined in terms of weight as a characteristic assessment parameter. Currently the structural concepts are being optimised using the Finite Element Method (FEM).