Conference article

The aircraft design process involves the interaction among disciplines with different nature. Finding an optimal concept is a trade off task that requires time and experience from designers and engineers. Multidisciplinary Design optimization (MDO) methods help to automatise and to simplify that complex task, aiming to obtain design solutions that comply with multiple requirements and constraints at once. The present work seeks to develop a conceptual design framework of a remotely piloted aircraft (RPA). A review on this subject is presented, identifying different MDO approaches. The analysed disciplines of aeronautical design are: geometry, aerodynamics, weight, performance, stability and flight dynamics. The relationship among them are presented in a block diagram. Afterwards, a technique of MDO is applied to the framework, assembling a mono objective problem using the Particle Swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to minimise aircraft structural mass under stability constraints. This objective is obtained from dimensional parameters of feasible aircraft concepts as output solution of the process. Therefore, the MDO method speeds the design process up, without employing the traditional trial and error approach, which, as well as doesn’t guarantee the achievement of an optimal configuration, turns the process slow and expensive.

conceptual design, MDO, optimization, PSO, RPA