Accelerating structural optimization in the early aircraft design phases
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In the search for higher efficiencies, a number of unconventional aircraft planforms have been proposed to replace the conventional tube and wing airliner. With entirely new designs, these new configurations would have to be designed from a clean sheet and makes for a risky proposition. To ensure that such an endeavor would succeed, high-fidelity geometry and analysis would need to be introduced earlier in the aircraft design process to ensure that the configuration is feasible before any component is manufactured. This thesis pursues this idea and presents several methods in which high-fidelity aircraft structures can be generated, analyzed and optimized in a faster manner. Within the design process, bottlenecks can occur in the geometry/mesh generation and the computationally expensive analysis modules. To speed up the generation process, a parametric framework was written which takes a set of inputs and automatically and quickly generates a finite element analysis (FEA) model of a wing structure. Fidelity is maintained by being able to model all primary structural components in both conventional and unconventional aircraft configurations. This ability to rapidly create meshes is then leveraged to generate models of different resolutions, which can be tailored for the various FEA analysis types in terms of computational speed and accuracy. One of the most computationally expensive FEA analysis is finding the buckling eigenvalues. To reduce the cost of local buckling analysis, an iterative method calculates the eigenvalue of an aircraft panel and its surrounding section. This method was found to match the eigenvalues of the same global model to high degree of accuracy at a lower computational cost. To find the global eigenvalues without repeating the local eigenvalues, a displacement constraint method was applied to limit the possible mode shapes. This application guarantees only global mode shapes from the eigenvalue solver, making the extraction of global buckling eigenvalues easier. These methods are applied the optimization of a conventional wingbox and the unconventional structures of a blended wing body and truss-braced wing, where the complete model is generated from scratch and optimized under its aeroelastic loading with stress and buckling constraints. Their demonstration shows that ability design and optimize with high-fidelity geometry and methods can be applied at the start of the aircraft design process and can be applied for unconventional aircraft planforms.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2022; ©2022 |
| Publication date | 2022; 2022 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Qian, Jason |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Alonso, Juan José, 1968- |
| Thesis advisor | Alonso, Juan José, 1968- |
| Thesis advisor | Kroo, Ilan |
| Thesis advisor | Senesky, Debbie |
| Degree committee member | Kroo, Ilan |
| Degree committee member | Senesky, Debbie |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Jason Qian. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2022. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/wp760tw1122 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2022 by Jason Qian
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