摘要 :
Innovative technologies are key to further increasing the performance of an aircraft and subsequently reducing its environmental footprint. Therefore, these technologies should be considered in the design process as early as possi...
展开
Innovative technologies are key to further increasing the performance of an aircraft and subsequently reducing its environmental footprint. Therefore, these technologies should be considered in the design process as early as possible. Especially concepts such as laminar flow control offer great potential for aerodynamic improvement and can increase the efficiency of future commercial aircraft. However, past research indicated that the potential offered by a retrofit application of this technology is naturally limited. Therefore, we present a novel wing design method, which enables a detailed and transparent but still runtime-efficient design process. The key element of the approach is using a robust aerodynamic database to map complex flow phenomena. The aerodynamic data are used to automatically select the most suitable airfoil family and subsequently the optimum airfoil-sweep combination for a given set of input data and design objectives. For this, a multi-criteria decision-making process is utilized. The approach is implemented in Matlab and converges in less than a minute. Hence, it is well suited to be integrated into a conceptual aircraft design suite such as the in-house "Multidisciplinary Integrated Aircraft Design and Optimization" (MICADO) environment. Although the approach is not limited to a specific aircraft size or technology application, the work at hand demonstrates its capabilities on CS-25 aircraft designs. Starting with a detailed examination of the results of each process step for a short-range aircraft, subsequent studies include varying design Mach numbers and a medium-range aircraft application case with designs of both turbulent and laminar wings. One outstanding factor of the proposed method is that every result of each step can be transparently analyzed; this sets it apart from black box design and optimization frameworks. The results show that the method reacts to variations of the user defined input data and optimizes the geometry in the scope of the given design objectives. However, these objectives currently focus only on optimizing aerodynamics. This often results in selecting higher sweep angles than usually expected for a specific use case. Therefore, future improvements of the method foresee the integration of other design objectives to also consider detrimental effects such as increasing wing mass in case of increased sweep angles. This is the next step towards a multidisciplinary optimized wing already in the early stage of aircraft design.
收起
