An Aeroelastic Multi-Fidelity Approach for Aeroelastic Tailoring

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel approach to the optimisation of composite wing structures. The goal of this research is to design a wing structure, which uses passive load alleviation to reduce the aeroelastic loads acting on the wing, thus resulting in a lighter wing structure and hence a lighter aircraft. This passive load alleviation can be achieved by using the directional sti ness properties of composite materials to tailor the aeroelastic response of the wing. This inherently result in a large design freedom for the designer, making it a challenge to explore the aeroelastic design space e�ciently. Therefore a multi- delity multidisciplinary approach to the optimisation of a composite wing structure is proposed, which employs a two-step optimisation procedure. The rst step is the optimisation of the wing structure using a low- delity nonlinear aeroelastic beam model. The result of this optimisation is then used for a more detailed optimisation of the wing structure using a shell model coupled to doublet-lattice method aerodynamics implemented in Nastran. A comparison between the beam model and the shell model clearly shows the validity of this approach, thus making it suitable for the optimisation of aeroelastically tailored wingbox structures.