Integration aspects of the collaborative aero-structural design of an unmanned aerial vehicle

Abstract

Overall aircraft design is a complex multidisciplinary process, which requires knowledge from many different fields such as structures, aerodynamics, systems and propulsion. For unconventional configurations lacking an empirical knowledge base, higher fidelity physics-based methods are required to reliably estimate the feasibility of a given new design concept. Analysis tools and results are provided by highly specialized groups of experts, possibly from different organizations. In the AGILE (aircraft 3rd generation MDO for innovative collaboration of heterogeneous teams of experts) project, new approaches to setting up cross-organizational collaborative aircraft design optimization workflows have been investigated, including the employment of common parametric aircraft configuration schema as a central common data schema and the provision of disciplinary analysis competences as callable services. Following this paradigm, the present paper details a distributed workflow to perform an aero-structural design optimization of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) design. Taking advantage of disciplinary capabilities provided by several partners based in various locations across Europe, an integrated design workflow including a distributed and tightly coupled aero-structural analysis loop has been assembled using the process integration and design optimization system remote component environment developed at the German Aerospace Center. To enable the necessary load and displacement transfer between non-matching disciplinary meshes, a versatile and lightweight algorithm using radial basis functions has furthermore been implemented. The functionality of the workflow is demonstrated by performing the optimization on the baseline configuration of the UAV.Keywords Multidisciplinary optimization · Fluid-structure interaction · Structural optimization · Preliminary aircraft design · Collaborative design · CPACS · AGILE project AbbreviationsAGILE Aircraft third-generation MDO for innovative collaboration of heterogeneous teams of experts APP Aircraft Performance Program CFD Computational fluid dynamics CPACS Common parametric aircraft configuration schema CSV Comma-separated values DLR German Aerospace Center DOE Design of experiments FEM Finite element method MDA Multidisciplinary analysis MDO Multidisciplinary design optimization MLS Moving least squares RANS Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes RBF Radial basis functions RCE Remote component environment UAV Unmanned aerial vehicle XDSM Extended design structure matrix

An MBSE Certification-Driven Design of a UAV MALE Configuration in the AGILE 4.0 Design Environment

“…In the linear approach, given the structural stiffness matrix (from Lagrange) and the aerodynamic influence coefficient matrix (from MUST), FAEDO solves the aeroelastic linear systems, including the flight mechanics longitudinal stability conditions for different values of altitudes, speed and mass layouts. The mapping between the aerodynamic and the structural grid is obtained with the implementation of the infinite plate splining (IPS) method presented in [26]. Fig.…”

Integration of multi-physics analysis into the cabin design process using virtual reality

“…Different methods have been proposed to compute the matrix H, such as Radial Basis Functions (RBF) by Beckert and Wendland [22] and Moving Least Squares (MLS) by Quaranta et al [23], which are applied in the following using the implementation presented in [24]. It follows from Eq.…”

Disciplinary Implications of a System Architecting Approach to Collaborative Aircraft Design

“…While rather low fidelity methods were employed for very unconventional configurations in most of the use cases, a consortium consisting of Airbus Defence and Space, CFS Engineering and the DLR, among others, worked on applying higher fidelity methods, such as structural sizing optimization on global FEM level and Euler aerodynamics on a comparatively common unmanned aerial vehicle configuration [26,5]. The key challenge in this use case was to integrate the high fidelity analysis capabilities provided by the partners in an automatic and tightly coupled aeroelastic design workflow using RCE.…”

“…• An unmanned aerial vehicle from the AGILE project [4], where a cross-organizational workflow has been set up in order to perform aero-structural MDO on the wing planform [5].…”