Creation of innovative concepts in Aerospace based on the Morphological Approach

Abstract

The development of innovative aircraft configurations can be an important contribution to achieve the emission reduction goals set for the aviation industry. However, current common aircraft conceptual design processes only allow the consideration of a limited number of initial configurations thus leaving possibly more efficient solutions out of scope. A significantly wider range of aircraft configurations can be taken into account by applying the Morphological Analysis. After a brief presentation of its historical background and actual applications in other domains, this article focuses on the use of this method and its benefits in aerospace. The summary and comparison of several applications in the field of aircraft design show that these still require a higher level of formalisation and robustness. For this purpose, the main steps required to integrate morphological analysis into the aircraft conceptual design phase based on the Advanced Morphological Approach are identified. These are the definition of the morphological matrix along with the evaluation criteria, the obtaining of option evaluations, filtering the impossible solutions and exploration of the solution space.