Advanced Usage of Vehicle Sketch Pad for CFD-Based Conceptual Design

Abstract

Conceptual design is the most fluid phase of aircraft design. It is important to be able to perform large scale design space exploration of candidate concepts that can achieve the design intent to avoid more costly configuration changes in later stages of design. This also means that conceptual design is highly dependent on the disciplinary analysis tools to capture the underlying physics accurately. The required level of analysis fidelity can vary greatly depending on the application. Vehicle Sketch Pad (VSP) allows the designer to easily construct aircraft concepts and make changes as the design matures. More recent development efforts have enabled VSP to bridge the gap to high-fidelity analysis disciplines such as computational fluid dynamics and structural modeling for finite element analysis. This paper focuses on the current state-of-the-art geometry modeling for the automated process of analysis and design of low-boom supersonic concepts using VSP and several capability-enhancing design tools. = reversed equivalent area γ = ratio of specific heat P = dimensional pressure P * = non-dimensional pressure P ∞ = free-stream pressure X e = equivalent length Nomenclature

Application of Adjoint Methodology to Supersonic Aircraft Design Using Reversed Equivalent Areas

“…While there have been studies 5,6 showing promise towards achieving sonic boom mitigation without the use of sensitivity information, design approaches based on sensitivity of the chosen cost functional with respect to aircraft shape offer an effective and theoretically sound way to reduce the adverse impact of sonic boom. Adjoint-based methods offer an efficient way of computing sensitivities of various aerodynamic quantities to many shape design parameters.…”

Application of Adjoint Methodology to Supersonic Aircraft Design Using Reversed Equivalent Areas

“…While there have been studies [5,6] showing promise toward achieving sonic-boom mitigation without the use of sensitivity information, design approaches based on sensitivity of the chosen cost functional with respect to aircraft shape offer an effective and theoretically sound way to reduce the adverse impact of sonic boom. Adjoint-based methods offer an efficient way of computing sensitivities of various aerodynamic quantities to many shape design parameters.…”