Heriberto David Solano
(Advisor: Prof. Dimitri Mavris)
will defend a doctoral thesis entitled,
A Flexible Methodology for Analysis and Optimization of Unconventional Wing Structural Geometries Using a Computationally Efficient Aeroelastic Model
On
Friday, April 21 at 8:00 a.m.
CoVE Weber SST II
and
Aerospace research and industry have been focused on pushing boundaries and designing next-generation aircraft to meet the aviation sector's needs and reducing its impact on climate change. During the early stages of design, it is important to design the structure to sustain loads specified by 14-CFR regulatory authorities while keeping the weight, sizes, and costs low. Unconventional designs, such as the truss-braced wing design, promise great structural and aerodynamic efficiency but require additional dynamic load considerations, and more accurate physical structural models. This work centers around the design and optimization of unconventional wing structures. A methodology is developed to best decide which model fidelity and tools to use during design space exploration to maximize exploration performance, with respect to the number of configurations considered, solution uncertainty, and confidence of optimum. Additionally, a computationally efficient model is developed that allows for the simulation of the truss-braced concept that has multiple components joined to one another as the primary structure. The model will be shown to have well-conditioned low-order physics, improve fidelity by including strength and buckling considerations, and accounting for stress concentrations.
To test the framework, five sets of experiments will be carried out: 1) demonstrate the methodology of choosing appropriate model fidelity by tracking the number of feasible alternatives explored and fitness of solution tracked, 2) demonstrate the accuracy of the developed lower-fidelity model by comparing to a higher-fidelity model with regards to structure layout sizing, 3) demonstrate that, by adding stress surrogates from a higher fidelity source into a lower fidelity model, it is possible to increase the amount of useful information at early stages of design and aid in structural sizing, 4) demonstrate that the lower fidelity model can properly analyze and size a complex multi-member structure, and 5) demonstrate that the developed conditioning procedure lowers the condition number of the differential-algebraic equation system and improves its run-time, under varying conditions. Finally, the capabilities developed will be demonstrated to perform studies on PEGASUS and the Truss-Braced wing configurations, under static and dynamic loading.
Committee
- Prof. Dimitri Mavris – School of Aerospace Engineering (advisor)
- Prof. Graeme Kennedy – School of Aerospace Engineering
- Prof. Cristina Riso – School of Aerospace Engineering
- Prof. Edmond Chow – School of Computational Science and Engineering
- Dr. Jesse Quinlan – Aeronautics Systems Analysis Branch, NASA Langley Research Center