Abstract
A method is presented for concurrent aerostructural optimization of wing planform, airfoil and high lift devices. The optimization is defined to minimize the aircraft fuel consumption for cruise, while satisfying the field performance requirements. A coupled adjoint aerostructural tool, that couples a quasi-three-dimensional aerodynamic analysis method with a finite beam element structural analysis is used for this optimization. The Pressure Difference Rule is implemented in the quasi-three-dimensional analysis and is coupled to the aerostructural analysis tool in order to compute the maximum lift coefficient of an elastic wing. The proposed method is able to compute the maximum wing lift coefficient with reasonable accuracy compared to high-fidelity CFD tools that require much higher computational cost. The coupled aerostructural system is solved using the Newton method. The sensitivities of the outputs of the developed tool with respect to the input variables are computed through combined use of the chain rule of differentiation, automatic differentiation and coupled-adjoint method. The results of a sequential optimization, where the wing shape and high lift device shape are optimized sequentially, is compared to the results of simultaneous wing and high lift device optimization.
Highlights
Knowledge of the physics of high-lift devices (HLD) has come a long way since the fundamental paper of A.M.O Smith on high-lift aerodynamics in 1975 (Smith 1975), analysis and optimization of high-lift devices still proves to be a difficult subject
Besides producing the given outputs, the panel method is able to produce the derivatives of the outputs with respect to the inputs using a combination of the chain rule of differentiation and Automatic Differentiation (AD) in
While the aerostructural tool developed by Elham and Van Tooren has been validated for wing drag and wing deformation (Elham and van Tooren 2016a), the enhanced method needs to be validated for maximum wing lift coefficient prediction and computation of wing lift over drag ratios in high-lift conditions
Summary
Knowledge of the physics of high-lift devices (HLD) has come a long way since the fundamental paper of A.M.O Smith on high-lift aerodynamics in 1975 (Smith 1975), analysis and optimization of high-lift devices still proves to be a difficult subject. Example of application of such high-fidelity analysis for wing optimization can be found in the work of Martins et al (2004), Kennedy and Martins (2014) and Barcelos and Maute (2008) The downside of these tools is that they require the use of high performance computational resources, making optimization problems in some cases too costly to solve. In this paper a method for concurrent aerostructural optimization of wing and HLD is presented In such a method the shape of the wing planform, airfoil, HLD as well as the wingbox structure is optimized simultaneously to minimize the aircraft mission fuel weight and satisfy the aircraft field performance requirements, that are the main drivers for HLD design. A test case optimization is presented for a Fokker 100 class wing
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