Abstract
The Air Force Research Lab’s Multidisciplinary Science and Technology Center is investigating conceptual design processes and computing frameworks that could significantly impact the design of the next generation efficient supersonic air vehicle (ESAV). The ESAV conceptual design process must accommodate appropriate fidelity multidisciplinary engineering analyses (MDAs) to assess the impact of new air vehicle technologies. These analyses may be coupled and computationally expensive, posing a challenge due to the large number of air vehicle configurations analyzed during conceptual design. In light of these observations, a design process using the Service-Oriented Computing Environment (SORCER) software is implemented to combine propulsion, structures, aerodynamics, aeroelasticity, and performance in an integrated MDA. The SORCER software provides the automation and tight integration to grid computing resources necessary to achieve the volume of appropriate fidelity analyses required. Two design studies are performed using a gradient-based optimization method to produce long and short range ESAV wing designs. The studies demonstrate the capability of the ESAV MDA, the optimization algorithm, and the computational scalability and reliability of the SORCER software.
Highlights
The ability of a new aircraft design to meet various requirements is largely dictated by decisions made during the conceptual design phase [1, 2]
Each design variable is independently swept from its lower bound to its upper bound in equal steps. This process is costly, but it serves three important purposes: (1) the sweeps provide a set of results that engineers may use to assess the validity of the multidisciplinary engineering analyses (MDAs) implementation; (2) the results may be used to screen design variables and responses for significance, which may result in a smaller multidisciplinary optimization (MDO) problem; and (3) the sweep results are used to calculate the sensitivities for the first iteration of the gradient-based optimization process
The structural sizing suboptimization was driven in this case by two of the four maneuvers: the 9.0 g pull-up at Mach 0.9; and the 7.2 g pull-up at Mach 1.2
Summary
The ability of a new aircraft design to meet various requirements is largely dictated by decisions made during the conceptual design phase [1, 2]. It is advantageous to assess as many air vehicle designs with the highest fidelity analyses possible given the available resources (e.g., human, schedule, and computational) This tradeoff between number of designs analyzed and available resources has typically favored the use of low fidelity closed-form equations and statistical models in conceptual design. These computationally inexpensive tools facilitate the assessment of large numbers of designs, but typically lack the fidelity to uncover significant engineering risks or are unable to assess the impact of new technologies. The conceptual design process described is based on the availability of such resources and incorporates analyses from several engineering
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