Planform as Platform: An Approach to Air Vehicle Conceptual Synthesis

摘要

The current air vehicle systems engineering process encourages the rapid selection of a baseline design during concept exploration studies. Decision-making during these early phase studies often relies on a rational basis approach leveraging accepted design maxims, qualitative assessments, and limited quantitative studies based on fundamental equations from individual design disciplines. In many cases, this approach does not capture critical disciplinary interactions and nonlinearities, resulting in the selection of a baseline concept that cannot meet performance requirements. This paper presents an approach that is intended to facilitate improved concept synthesis based on hierarchical libraries of scalable planform configurations. The approach defines planform families a priori by topological, size, payload, and mission classes, with members of each family differing by continuous shape parameters. A selection process based on Pareto efficiency discovers planforms that optimize multidisciplinary performance metrics. To synthesize a design to meets specified requirements, a planform family is chosen, and an optimization algorithm coupled to a sizing and performance analysis determines the optimum configuration within the family based on minimum weight or other criteria. The advantage of this partitioned approach is that it casts the conceptual design process as a problem of selecting among vetted configuration elements. The selection of a planform defines a trusted "platform" for the design with compartmentalized complexity that reduces downstream programmatic risk.