Automated Sizing of a Composite Wing for the Usage within a Multidisciplinary Design Process

In times of reducing product development cycles and greater economical, safety and ecological requirements on aircraft structures innovative aircraft configurations with new materials and new structural design concepts become more and more important. Although their positive impact on the conventional pre-design methods come to their limits and to an appropriate tools for design and evaluation the need for Multidisciplinary Design Optimization increases. . In this paper a structural design and optimization module developed for the application in such an optimization process is presented. The module is coupled to the software environment DELiS where structural models mathematically described by finite elements can be automatically created, based on a parametric description. The outer loads, coming from CFD or aeroelastic calculations, are applied to the model and inner loads are calculated utilizing a linear static finite element analysis. To evaluate the results information about inner loads, displacements, properties and geometry are passed to the commercial software tool HyperSizer. Material parameters like thickness and stacking sequence and also cross sectional stringer parameters are optimized for the given loads on panel level. For sizing and optimization a set of failure criteria is used; analytical equations are available for a reduced calculation time. The capabilities of the module and the sizing approach are demonstrated on a composite wing of a long range transport aircraft.