Location

Collaborative Design Environment (CoDE) Weber Space Science and Technology Building (SST II)

Bogdan-Paul Dorca 
(Advisor: Prof. Dimitri Mavris] 

will propose a doctoral thesis entitled, 

A Hybrid Conceptual Design Methodology for Supersonic Aircraft using Morphing Technology  

On 

Tuesday, December 5 at 09:00 a.m. EST 

Collaborative Design Environment (CoDE) 

Weber Space Science and Technology Building (SST II) 

and 

Online: Click here to join the meeting 

 

Abstract 
Time has an ever-increasing value in today’s society, as an economist might express the value of time in opportunity costs. This is especially relevant in the aviation sector where current civil aircraft fly at Mach 0.80-0.85, while supersonic aircraft can cruise at more than twice that Mach number and thus offer the potential of a dramatic decrease in travel time.  This could cause a global transportation paradigm shift, as a supersonic aircraft cruising around Mach 1.8 would mean that you can get anywhere around the world, from New York, in less than 10 hours. Challenges arise however as the Mach number is increased past Mach 1 (e.g. transonic flight modelling challenges, aerodynamic center shift, sonic boom, aerodynamic heating).  

 

A promising technology that could pave the way for the future generation of supersonic aircraft is morphing. A morphing aircraft can be defined as an aircraft that changes its configuration to increase its performance at different flight conditions, respectively it can continuously modify its geometry in order to enhance flight performance, control authority and multi-mission capability. Together with the recent technological developments of smart materials, the unconventional transformation of morphing provides adaptability for multiple flight phases when compared to conventional airplanes that are typically optimized with a bias towards a single mission segment (e.g. cruise for transport aircraft). This feature is especially beneficial for supersonic aircraft that have to fly subsonically over land as supersonic flight is currently banned in that region.  

 

The objective of this research is to investigate the usefulness and applicability of morphing concepts for supersonic aircraft by developing a novel methodology focused on introducing this technology as early as possible in the design cycle. Most current research focuses on applying morphing technology onto existing aircraft which have been already designed as fixed-wing aircraft. This way of thinking instantly reduces some of the potential benefits of this technology as many decisions would be different if morphing was considered from the start.   

 

A hybrid design methodology that incorporates the benefits of forward design and inverse design through the use of Invertible Neural Networks (INN) is proposed to deal with the design challenges of morphing technology.  With the addition of multiple morphing degrees of freedom, the trade-off between subsonic and supersonic cruise efficiency will be less severe and off-design performance will be enhanced due to the flexibility that morphing technology offers. Aircraft can be optimized for all flight segments simultaneously which can lead to significant weight and cost savings. Surrogate modelling can also be employed in order to ensure that performance impacts can be captured at a reduced computational time compared to using specialized tools. This would thus enable rapid design space exploration for supersonic aircraft equipped with morphing technology. 

 

Committee 

  • Prof. Dimitri Mavris – School of Aerospace Engineering (advisor) 
  • Prof. Lakhsmi N. Sankar – School of Aerospace Engineering 
  • Prof. Daniel P. Schrage – School of Aerospace Engineering 
  • Dr. Jimmy C. M. Tai – School of Aerospace Engineering 
  • Mr. Jonathan Seidel – National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)