THE PARADISE FOR PRE-DESIGNING AIRCRAFT AND SYSTEMS

Abstract

The early identification of risks and costs is a major key for the successful development of any technical system. Up to 85 percent of the total life-cycle costs are determined early during the conception and design stages [1]. To enable making sound design decisions, a holistic understanding of the system, together with the complex correlations of its elements, is fundamental. The amount of information needed to build and operate a civil aircraft, for instance, can easily exceed a 100 meter tall tower of documents. And the complex consequences of taking bleed air from a jet engine to allow an active flow control on flaps have to be precisely understood. Multidisciplinary design teams are established to master the complexity and information need. Those teams use design tools to forecast and analyze the aircraft’s behavior and they apply design models to highlight different aspects of the aircraft while ensuring a basic common understanding among all engineering disciplines. For several decades this approach has been leading to today’s typical aircraft configurations whose potential for further optimization seems to be more and more limited. But the widely agreed and challenging goals of the ACARE council related to e.g. sustainability require bigger steps in optimization [2], which may only be achieved by a so-called “game changer”, an innova-tive and unconventional aircraft configuration. Unfortunately, current design processes, tools, and design models are often specialized for (and validated by) classical configurations and thus, are not capable of designing unconventional configurations. In short, they are not flexible enough.