High-fidelity multidisciplinary design optimization of flexible aircraft wings

Multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) was performed on an aircraft wing using high-fidelity design tools. The wing aerodynamics were analyzed using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with FLUENT and the wing structure was analyzed via finite element analysis (FEA) in ANSYS. MATLAB was used as a wrapper to perform computational static aeroelastic analysis on any wing configuration using the aforementioned high-fidelity tools. A main program was developed to convert pressures to forces, map the CFD grid to the FEA mesh, and to transfer the FEA displacements back to the CFD grid. The static aeroelastic software was coupled with the multidisciplinary design feasible (MDF) MDO architecture using sequential quadratic programming (SQP) to perform the optimization. The optimization was given the maximum amount of design freedom to create any wing shape. Ultimately, it was found that MDO is possible using these high-fidelity tools and that, to get a true wing design, aeroelastic effects must be included in the MDO procedure.