Increased demand for improved aircraft performance and efficiency has led to consideration of structural weight reduction and manufacturing cost savings opportunities early in the design cycle. SPANDSET is a toolkit developed to facilitate these goals. By using lower fidelity classical analysis methods it is able to automate preliminary airplane wing box sizing at rapid speeds suitable for design space exploration. A case study illustrates how SPANDSET enables top-down design for a previously existing small business jet wing box structure and resulted in an improved design in terms of weight and cost.
This paper highlights a preliminary airframe structural analysis capability for evaluation of candidate wing structural designs, with the goal of producing accurate weight and recurring cost data from high level airplane design data. SPANDSET, the integrated structural analysis toolkit that implements this capability, allows rapid definition of wing geometry, calculation of internal loads, preliminary analysis of wing structural elements and recurring cost evaluation of the candidate design. A case study involving a large business jet aircraft is documented to illustrate the approach and the types of results that can be obtained.
Nomenclature
AR= wing aspect ratio b = wing semi-span length c = wing chord length E = axial modulus EI = wing section bending stiffness G = shear modulus GJ = wing section torsional stiffness M = wing bending moment t = wing airfoil thickness T = wing torsional moment TR = wing tip ratio V = wing shear force η = normalized wing semi-span location (butt-line location/wing semi-span length)
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