Preliminary Aircraft Design in a Collaborative Multidisciplinary Design Environment

Abstract

*† ‡ A novel flexible preliminary aircraft design system is presented which builds on DLR’s collaborative design environment. The system utilizes analysis modules, which are developed and provided by DLR disciplinary experts, and the unified data format CPACS for interdisciplinary coupling. The preliminary aircraft design system allows for physics based design evaluations and thus more accurate performance predictions for novel technologies and novel aircraft configurations. The workflow of the preliminary aircraft design system is used in an example design problem for a conventional short to medium range aircraft. The results of a single-point analysis as well as a sensitivity analysis are compared to results obtained from an established state-of-the-art preliminary aircraft design program. The comparison reveals that similar quantitative and qualitative results can be obtained. Increasing demand in communication and coordination, rather than technical issues stemming from the distributed computing approach, have been identified as obvious challenges in the development of such complex workflow.