Sean Meldrum, Pierre Hardy, Gabriel Broux, Eric Garrigues
DOI Number: N/A
Conference number: IFASD-2015-121
During initial design phase the evaluation of the aircraft’s structural mass for various plan forms is still a challenge. The structural mass has to be minimized while sustaining loads and satisfying various aeroelastic constraints. These constraints could be avoiding flutter phenomena in the flight envelope or guarantying static aeroelastic characteristics such as aileron efficiency. This paper describes an industrial method developed at Dassault Aviation to perform this aero-structural optimization. This fully automatic process can compute the optimized structural weights of several configurations. Combining this with aerodynamic performance data for each configuration, it becomes a powerful tool to drive the design of new aircraft. First the global outline of the process will be presented. Then the elementary blocs of the process will be briefly described; finite element modelling, aerodynamic and load computation and finally optimization strategy. Finally two applications will be shown to demonstrate the relevance of the project. The first example is that of a flutter optimization done during the development of a new Falcon jet. The flutter optimization is shown to be an efficient tool to minimize structural reinforcement for flutter and thus improve global aircraft performance. The second application is a study using the complete process to determine the effect of the winglet’s height on aircraft mass. The optimized mass of the wing, with respect to both flutter and loads, is calculated for three different winglet heights. The aim is to demonstrate the potential of the process to drive aircraft design and find an optimal shape with respect to both aerodynamic performance and aircraft mass.