Design of an airfreight system based on innovative PrandtlPlane aircraft

摘要

The PrandtlPlane configuration is conveniently applied to very large aircraft and, in this paper, the design of a freighter of 24 intermodal containers is chosen as a significant example of application. The maximum range of this big freighter is 3.000 miles. The range limitation is accomplished by the definition of a set of freight airports to be positioned properly worldwide; a mathematical theory has been formulated in order to optimize the positions of these dedicated airports on the basis of economical parameters; some examples are shown in the first part.. The second part of the paper is dedicated to the optimization of the aircraft configuration, using a homemade optimization code; the objective function is the aerodynamic efficiency with constraints regarding the stability of flight and stall characteristics. A set of different local minima are determined, corresponding to solutions that satisfy all the constraints imposed and the absolute minimum is chosen inside this set on the basis of further conditions on structural aspects. The solutions include PrandtlPlanes in which a third lifting surface is considered in addition to the configuration.