Author(s)

L. Fitschy, F. Thirifay, E. Wyart, S. Pierret & P. Geuzaine

Abstract

The objective of weight reduction and the introduction of new materials lead to aeronautical structures that are less stiff. As a consequence, coupled fluid-structure simulations become essential to predict the performance of aircraft. In addition, structural design can now benefit from the use of mature optimization techniques. In this paper, these two disciplines are combined and applied to the structural design of a lightweight six-passenger aircraft wing. Keywords: aeroelasticity, optimization, structural design, code coupling. 1 Introduction A large class of fluid-structure interaction problems require the simultaneous application of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and computational structural dynamics (CSD). Since each discipline has developed powerful specialized tools, a partitioned procedure is preferred for solving coupled field nonlinear fluid-structure interactions (FSI) problems. During the past years, CENAERO has developed a FSI platform involving the coupling of its three-dimensional unstructured flow solver Argo with the Samcef Mecano [1] finite element structural solver through theMpCCI [2] software in order to perform aeroelastic simulations. CENAERO has also developed an optimization software Max to deal with complex optimization problems. This software allows to perform derivative free optimization with very few calls to computer intensive simulation software. The method is based on the use of a genetic algorithm using real coded variables and on the construction of an approximate model. In this work, the FSI platform and the optimization software are coupled to perform the optimization of the structural model of a lightweight six-passenger aircraft wing with multi-disciplinary constraints. The objective is to minimize

Keywords

aeroelasticity, optimization, structural design, code coupling.