Tool for preliminary structural sizing, weight estimation, and aeroelastic optimization of lifting surfaces

This paper presents the development and implementation of a tool for wing structural sizing and aeroelastic optimization in early design steps, where the amount of available data about the wing structure is not enough to allow high-fidelity finite element analysis and optimization. The proposed tool consists of two levels. The first level is a quasi-analytical method for wing structural weight estimation and initially sizing of the wing box structure. The second level is an aeroelastic tool that uses a vortex lattice method and a finite beam element to compute the stress distribution in the wing box structure. The Newton method is used to solve the coupled system. The coupled adjoint sensitivity analysis method is used to compute the sensitivity of any function of interest with respect to the design variables. The tool was used for a series of wing aeroelastic optimizations to minimize the wing weight with a series of constraints on the wing structural failure modes and aileron effectiveness. Another series of optimizations is also used to find the wing jig shape for a predefined cruise shape. The outputs of the optimizations showed that the wing box weight varies quadratically with the required value for the aileron effectiveness.