Aero-Elastic Multipoint Optimization Using the Coupled Adjoint Approach

Abstract

In the aircraft design process, several flight conditions that cover the flight envelop have to be considered, where the wing’s structure behaves differently at these different flight conditions. Considering the structural behavior during the design optimization is computationally expensive, therefore an efficient approach is required when optimizing aero-structural systems. The coupled adjoint approach which is efficiently employed in gradient-based optimizations was previously developed at DLR and successfully applied for optimizing coupled aero-structural systems with high-fidelity flow and structure solvers. This new study employs the coupled adjoint approach to perform a proof-of-concept multipoint aero-elastic optimization. The optimized design is then compared to another design resulting from a single point optimization and proved to have a better overall performance.