Development of Multidisciplinary, Multi-Fidelity Analysis and Integration of Aerospace Vehicles

ABSTRACT: Current aircraft design approaches incorporate the use of many high fidelity models for point solutions of individual disciplines. Sophisticated model integration techniques are not yet readily available and a significant amount of individual discipline “stovepiping” exists. Individual handoffs of point solutions between disciplines often results in repeated individual data interpretations. These interpretations often lead to erroneous decisions and/or add-in design conservatism. The technical goals of the Phase II effort will be to develop a multi-disciplinary computational framework that can decide efficiently where to use high fidelity models and where low fidelity models are sufficient. A demonstration will be conducted on an aircraft design model combining multiple levels of aerodynamic loading, stress analysis and structural reliability. This Phase II will be set up to show that models from acoustic fatigue, structure and material disciplines can be efficiently, computationally combined to address structural reliability of the panel. The objective will be to show that mathematic complexity can be harnessed with this STTR demonstration to optimize the system reliability of a stiffened multi-bay aircraft panel. The fully-probabilistic models assess the uncertainty in design characteristics to determine the statistical distribution of the response throughout the system. BENEFIT: Simulation-based design and certification is fundamentally about making decisions with uncertainty. The methodology developed under this Phase II program will yield a computational framework that will help the engineer by providing guidance on the following key issues: (1) How will changing the scale and fidelity of the analysis impact the uncertainty in the results? (2)What is the actual uncertainty in the simulation results? The structure of this framework will support the system engineering processes typically used by military and commercial aircraft OEMs. Successful completion of this Phase II STTR program will yield a computational framework closely aligned with realizing the long term Air Force vision of developing “digital twin” of the future hypersonic vehicles capable of global strike..