Aero-structural Optimization of a MALE Configuration in the AGILE MDO Framework

Abstract

Aircraft, and in particular military aircraft, are complex systems and the demand for high-performance flying platforms is constantly growing both for civil and  military purposes.  The development of aircraft is inherently  multidisciplinary and the exploitation of the interaction between the disciplines driving the design opens the door for new (unconventional) aircraft designs, and consequently, for novel aircraft having increased performance. In modern aircraft development processes and procedures, it is crucial to enable the engineers accessing complex design spaces, especially in the conceptual design phase where key configuration decisions are made and frozen for later development phases. Pushing more MDO and numerical analysis capabilities into the early design phase will support the decision-making process through reliable physical information for very large design spaces which can hardly be grasped and explored by humans without the support of automated numerical analysis capabilities. Therefore, from the start of the aircraft development, process computer simulations play a major role in the prediction of the physical properties and behavior of the aircraft. Recent advances in computational performance and simulation capabilities provide sophisticated physics based models, which can deliver disciplinary analysis data in a time effective manner, even for unconventional configurations. However, a major challenge arises in aircraft design as the properties from different disciplines (aerodynamics, structures, stability and control, etc.) are in constant interaction with each other. This challenge is even greater when specialized competences are provided by several multidisciplinary teams distributed among different organizations. It is therefore important to connect not only the simulation models between organizations, but also the corresponding experts to combine all competences and accelerate the design process to find the best possible solution. A multi-disciplinary study of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), presented in this article, was performed by eight different partners all over Europe to show the advances during the Horizon 2020 project Aircraft 3rd Generation  MDO for Innovative Collaboration of Heterogeneous Teams of Experts (AGILE).