Topology optimization on fuel tank rib structures for fuel sloshing suppression based on hybrid fluid-solid SPH simulation

摘要

In this paper, we propose a topology optimization method for aircraft fuel tank structural design to reduce the fuel sloshing effect, which is beneficial for aircraft fuel gauge accuracy and flight safety. The method is applied to optimize the hole layouts in the tank rib to reduce fuel sloshing time, increase stiffness, and guarantee lightweight requirements. Specifically, we introduce a hybrid fluid-solid particle based simulator by modeling the impact and elastic forces between fluid (fuel) and solid (ribs, tank wall), to analysis violent fuel sloshing inside the complicated internal tanks, caused by large angle maneuvers and accelerations of an aircraft. Meanwhile, an effective optimizer is built for the rib design, in which the explicitly controlled hole layouts are projected onto the modeled solid particles, such that the process of finite element meshing and remeshing is no longer needed during each optimization iteration. In this way, our proposed method is able to work with complicated aircraft fuel tanks under violent fuel sloshing conditions. We then use a real aircraft wing tank as design case to validate the proposed framework. The result shows that by the generated layout of rib holes, the fuel sloshing time is shortened by 46%, the maximal fuel gauge error is reduced by 14%, and the maximal center of gravity (CG) shift is reduced by 0.15 m.