Conceptual multidisciplinary aircraft design using aero-structural adjoint-based methods

Abstract

Nowadays, on the one hand aircraft design reached very high-fidelity level and aircraft manufacturers obtained such experience that they deeply rely on their design work-flow, models and tests. On the other hand, aircraft architecture struggles to change. Indeed, because of uncertainty and risk management reasons engineers are worried to explore new designs. Moreover, preliminary design models do not enable unconventional aircraft design. By combining the current Overall Aircraft Design models with aero-structural analysis and optimization information, this research work introduces an innovative multidisciplinary approach to be implemented in the preliminary aircraft design phase for novel configurations. The procedure was successfully tested with a forward swept wing-body architecture for which classical preliminary design method was not able to catch physical behaviours due to the wing bending-torsion coupling.