Large-scale design of supersonic aircraft via collaborative optimization.

摘要

The design of supersonic aircraft requires complex analysis in multiple disciplines, posing a challenge for multidisciplinary optimization methods. In this thesis, collaborative optimization, a design architecture developed to solve large-scale multidisciplinary design problems, is applied to the design of supersonic transport concepts. Collaborative optimization, takes advantage of natural disciplinary segmentation to facilitate parallel execution of design tasks. Discipline-specific design optimization proceeds while a coordinating mechanism ensures progress toward an optimum and compatibility between disciplinary designs.; Two concepts for supersonic aircraft are investigated: a conventional delta-wing design and a natural laminar flow concept that achieves improved performance by exploiting properties of supersonic flow to delay boundary layer transition. The work involves the development of aerodynamics and structural analyses, and integration within a collaborative optimization framework. Response surface estimation and reduced basis modeling were used to reduce the computational expense of the optimization and to ensure smooth analytic gradients.; Both design problems converged successfully. In each problem, the system optimizer minimized aircraft take-off weight with respect to global and disciplinary design variables, subject to aeroelastic and performance constraints. In previous work, the method successfully solved simple and medium fidelity problems. The current work demonstrates collaborative optimization with large-scale designs using industry-standard analyses. The research shows that collaborative optimization is a valuable method for large-scale design, ready for real-world implementation.