Abstract
ABSTRACT: The present work is concerned with the accurate modeling of transport airplanes. This is of primary importance to reduce aircraft development risks and because multi-disciplinary design and optimization (MDO) frameworks require an accurate airplane modeling to carry out realistic optimization tasks. However, most of them still make use of tail volume coefficients approach for sizing horizontal and vertical tail areas. The tail-volume coefficient method is based on historical aircraft data and it does not consider configuration particularities like wing sweepback angle and tail topology. A methodology based on static stability and controllability criteria was elaborated and integrated into a MATLAB application for airplane design. Immediate advantages with the present methodology are the design of realistic tail surfaces and properly sized airplanes. Its validation was performed against data of five airliners ranging from the regional jet CRJ-100 to the Boeing 747-100 intercontinental airplane. An existing airplane calculator application incorporated the present tail-sizing methodology. In order to validate the updated application, the Fokker 100 airliner was fully conceptually designed using it.
Highlights
It is of fundamental importance for any optimization framework tailored to airplane design the use of realistic airplane models
The main objective of the present paper was the calculation of the horizontal tail (HT) and vertical tail (VT) areas through a higher fidelity method than that offered by the tail volume approach
Before integrating the present methodology into an airplane design application, a numerical tool written in MATLAB® language was developed for tailplane analysis only
Summary
It is of fundamental importance for any optimization framework tailored to airplane design the use of realistic airplane models. If the disciplines that are embedded in the airplane modeling are not accurate enough, it makes no sense performing any optimization tasks, because the resulting planes may be unviable to develop or deliver an acceptable performance. The present work is concerned with the development of a computational tool able to properly model transport airplane configurations. Tail surfaces are used to both stabilize the aircraft and provide control authority that is needed for maneuver and trim. For a conventional aircraft configuration, the tail often has two components, the horizontal and the vertical tails. The primary functions of these components are: take care of airplane trim and stability, and provide control by the elevator and rudder surfaces which are associated with the horizontal and vertical tails, respectively
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