Aerostructural Design Exploration of a Wing in Transonic Flow
Nicolas Bons, Joaquim R. R. A. Martins
Abstract
Multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) has been previously applied to aerostructural wing design problems with great success. Most previous applications involve fine-tuning a well-designed aircraft wing. In this work, we broaden the scope of the optimization problem by exploring the design space of aerostructural wing design optimization. We start with a rectangular wing and optimize the aerodynamic shape and the sizing of the internal structure to achieve minimum fuel burn on a transonic cruise mission. We use a multi-level optimization procedure to decrease computational cost by 40%. We demonstrate that the optimization can transform the rectangular wing into a swept, tapered wing typical of a transonic aircraft. The optimizer converges to the same wing shape when starting from a different initial design. Additionally, we use a separation constraint at a low-speed, high-lift condition to improve the off-design performance of the optimized wing. The separation constraint results in a substantially different wing design with better low-speed performance and only a slight decrease in cruise performance.