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A study of multidisciplinary design concerning the incorporation of aeroelastic tailoring, control surface blending, and active aeroelastic wing concepts is presented. The design process incorporates response surfaces, fast probability integration and modal-basis multidisciplinary design optimization to characterize the design space. The wing box skins of a representative fighter configuration with multiple wing control surfaces are sized to minimum weight. A design of experiments approach is developed for the gear ratios in control surface blending.Design optimization is conducted for each set of gearing functions. The control surface gear ratios are then treated as "noise" in the structural design process, and a robust structural design is sought to account for the change in control laws that historically occur during the aircraft design process.The motivation for this methodology investigation is derived from the common occurrence of control law changes throughout the lifetime of an aircraft.

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A new method for concurrent trim and structural optimization of Active Aeroelastic Wing technology is presented. The new process treats trim optimization and structural optimization as an integrated problem in the same mathematical formulation, in which control surface gear ratios are included as design variables in a standard structural optimization algorithm. This new approach is in contrast to most of the existing AAW design processes in which structural optimization and trim optimization have separate objectives and are performed in an iterative, sequential manner. The new integrated AAW design process is demonstrated on a lightweight fighter type aircraft and compared to a sequential AAW design process. For this demonstration, the integrated process converges to a lower weight, and offers an advantage over the sequential process in that optimization is performed in one continuous run, whereas the sequential approach requires pausing and restarting the structural optimization to allow for trim optimization.

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