Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

Numerical Method For Rapid Aerostructural Design And Optimization, Jeffrey D. Taylor, Douglas F. Hunsaker

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Student Publications and Presentations

During early phases of wing design, analytic and low-fidelity methods are often used to identify promising design concepts. In many cases, solutions obtained using these methods provide intuition about the design space that is not easily obtained using higher-fidelity methods. This is especially true for aerostructural design. However, many analytic and low-fidelity aerostructural solutions are limited in application to wings with specific planforms and weight distributions. Here, a numerical method for minimizing induced drag with structural constraints is presented that uses approximations that apply to wings with arbitrary planforms and weight distributions. The method is applied to the NASA Ikhana …