The overarching goal of the proposed work is to develop and test methodologies for designing various airplane concepts subject to possible static and dynamic aeroelastic and flight dynamic performance…

This federal contract award, valued at $480,834.99, was granted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to the University of Alabama. The goal of the research is to develop and test methodologies for designing various airplane concepts subject to static and dynamic aeroelastic and flight dynamic performance constraints. The work will involve creating geometric modeling tools, enabling efficient and accurate high-fidelity and low-order aeroelastic solutions, developing an inverse design tool for wing structures, and integrating these elements into a multi-stage multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) process that considers both aerodynamic and aeroelastic/flight dynamic performance constraints. This contract is part of NASA's efforts to advance aircraft design capabilities and is aligned with the agency's mid-term and long-term goals and objectives. No set-aside designation was indicated for this award.

The overarching goal of the proposed work is to develop and test methodologies for designing various airplane concepts subject to possible static and dynamic aeroelastic and flight dynamic performance constraints. For several years, aircraft MDO studies were limited to aerodynamic optimization with static and linear static constraints. In the proposed study, both static and dynamic constraints will be introduced in the MDO solutions. To properly handle these constraints, particularly with the use of high-fidelity aeroelastic models, a multi-stage multidisciplinary design optimization approach is necessary to facilitate designing various aircraft concepts with the consideration of the structural, aerodynamic, nonlinear aeroelastic and flight dynamic constraints. Such a multistage MDO framework will be created to increase the aircraft flight efficiency by minimizing the drag and weight with constraints of aeroelastic stability and flight handling quality. The specific objectives of the proposed study are to: 1) create a geometrical modeling tool to handle the modeling of a wide range of aircraft configurations, 2) enable efficient and accurate high-fidelity and low-order aeroelastic solutions that are important to create the MDO solutions, 3) develop an inverse design tool for designing the detailed wing structures based on the inputs from the low-order models, 4) integrate the high-fidelity and low-order aeroelastic solutions in a multi-stage MDO solution with the consideration of both static and dynamic aeroelastic and flight dynamic constraints, and 5) explore fundamental conceptual designs using the developed MDO tool for improved flight performance. In the proposed study, the research will first be carried out to enhance geometric modeling for high-fidelity FEM solutions. Feature based geometrical modeling will be implemented using the PCL language of MSC.patran. This will enable to tool to be flexible to model any generic airplane configurations. Nurbs functions will be used to parameterize the features and the geometrical models. This will allow for sensitivity calculations, facilitating the MDO process. The next is to formulate the high-fidelity and low-order aeroelastic models, targeting for the aerodynamic optimization in free flight. While the low-order model takes the modal information from the high-fidelity model, an inverse design tool is to be developed for designing the high-fidelity wing from the beam type models. Lastly, an efficient MDO process will be developed and tested by integrating the high-fidelity and low-order aeroelastic formulations into a multi-stage optimization solution. IT should consider both the aerodynamic and aeroelastic/flight dynamic performance constraints of the aircraft. The research efforts proposed herein will overcome existing challenges in structural sizing and aeroelastic analyses in the conceptual design and optimization for innovative air vehicles. Therefore, the proposed research is well aligned with nasas midterm and longterm goals and objectives.