Certification-Driven Platform for Multidisciplinary Design Space Exploration in Airframe Preliminary Design

Abstract

Airworthiness certification is a mandatory but expensive process in aircraft development. To reduce certification cost, it is desired to incorporate certification considerations into aircraft early design stages. The tradeoff between performance and certification constraints and the interactions between the behind-the-scene disciplines require a multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) method implemented to incorporate certification considerations. Several MDO frameworks currently exist with mixing levels of fidelity and multidisciplinary coupling. However, few of them capture the impacts of certification constraints on the overall aircraft performance. Moreover, preceding MDO studies have mostly focused on optimizing a single design point, whereas little attention is paid to design space exploration. To fill these gaps, this paper proposes a certification-driven platform for airframe early preliminary design. With statistical methods applied, this platform allows efficient design space exploration and multi-objective optimization. To demonstrate the capabilities of this platform, a test case of preliminary horizontal tail design of a large twin-aisle aircraft is performed. The feasibility test and multi-objective optimization conducted in the test case prove that certification constraints play a critical role in the design space exploration at the early preliminary stage.