A Design Optimization Strategy for Micro Air Vehicles

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This paper presents progress on the development of a computational framework for synthesizing and optimizing the design of micro air vehicles with flapping wings. It is anticipated that aeroelastic tailoring can be used to improve the performance of mechanical flapping-wing micro air vehicles relative to designs with rigid structure. Due to the physics associated with micro air vehicles, the design framework must be able to capture nonlinear physical behavior with high fidelity, while at the same time maintaining the computational efficiency required for effective design space exploration. In the present paper, the authors present three newly developed components of the framework: a spectral element method for computing the system dynamics, an adjoint method for calculating sensitivities of the system with respect to changing structural design variables and an optimization component built upon existing gradient-based methods. These new components are integrated with existing components and the entire framework is used to compute flapping cycles for both rigid and flexible micro air vehicle models and to demonstrate consistency between the direct and adjoint forms for sensitivity computation.