Aeroelastic Mission Optimization of Very Flexible Vehicles including Take-Off and Climb Constraints

ifasd2024 Tracking Number 9

An increase in high aspect-ratio aircraft designs in recent years has led to more flexible vehicles. Increased flexibility may, however, result in nonlinear aeroelastic behavior which must be captured during the design stage. Time-domain simulations, in particular, must be used to assess a flexible vehicle's stability across a mission. However, in the context of gradient-based vehicle and trajectory optimization, considering time-domain analyses for nonlinear aeroelastic systems has remained elusive due to the complexity of determining sensitivities of a time-marched solution. This paper develops a time-domain solution capability which uses a collocation method including gradient information for optimization problems. The aeroelastic time-domain solution is used to formulate take-off, climb, and landing constraints. The constraint formulations are demonstrated on a multi-disciplinary design optimization problem of a blended wing body. Finally, a fully transient formulation for the nonlinear aeroelastic system is presented and the ramification discussed.