A Hierarchical Aeroelastic Engine for the Preliminary Design and Optimization of the Flexible Aircraft

Kurzfassung

The work introduces the Aeroelastic Engine, a module under development at DLR to support physics-based modeling and analysis of the complete flexible aircraft for preliminary multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) applications in a collaborative environment. The paper presents the implemented structural modeling, the analysis capabilities, and the coupling schemas to account for the fluid structure interactions. The structural representation provided by the module is based on a set of hierarchical Finite Element (FE) formulation. The implemented fluid-structure-interactions kernel is tailored for loosely coupled analysis, and is based on radial basis functions (RBF). Heterogeneous physics based analysis modules are orchestrated by an engineering environment based on the DLR’s central data model CPACS, and on the distributed framework RCE. Hence, the impact of the flexibility effects in pre-design are assessed for the aero-structurally coupled design of a medium-haul reference aircraft.