AN AEROELASTIC MULTI-FIDELITY APPROACH FOR AEROELASTIC TAILORING

摘要

This paper introduces a novel approach to the optimisation of composite wing structures. The goal of this research is to design a wing structure, which uses passive load alleviation to reduce the aeroelastic loads acting on the wing, thus resulting in a lighter wing structure and hence a lighter aircraft. This passive load alleviation can be achieved by using the directional stiffness properties of composite materials to tailor the aeroelastic response of the wing. This inherently result in a large design freedom for the designer, making it a challenge to explore the aeroelastic design space efficiently. Therefore a multi-fidelity multidisciplinary approach to the optimisation of a composite wing structure is proposed, which employs a two-step optimisation procedure. The first step is the optimisation of the wing structure using a low-fidelity nonlinear aeroelastic beam model. The result of this optimisation is then used for a more detailed optimisation of the wing structure using a shell model coupled to doublet-lattice method aerodynamics implemented in Nastran. A comparison between the beam model and the shell model clearly shows the validity of this approach, thus making it suitable for the optimisation of aeroelastically tailored wingbox structures.