Ph.D. Thesis Proposal

By

Mario A. Lee

Advisor: Prof. Dimitri N. Mavris

1:00 PM, Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Weber Space Science and Technology Building (SST-II)

Collaborative Visualization Environment (CoVE)

A METHODOLOGY FOR THE CONCEPTUAL LEVEL

STRUCTURAL DESIGN OF CONVENTIONAL

TRANSPORT AIRCRAFT WING-BOXES USING THE

STATIC CONDENSATION REDUCED BASIS ELEMENT

METHOD

ABSTRACT:

In order to improve the energy efficiency and environmental compliancy of future aircraft, the aviation industry has sought to investigate the inclusion of a variety of new technologies that are capable of enabling these goals. Among these technologies is a suite of structural technologies that are aimed at reducing airframe weight. At the conceptual level of aircraft design, the issues of vehicle weight and technology impact are of paramount importance. In the literature, there is a consensus that the finite element method is the most accurate numerical method for determining structural behavior and as a result, deriving the weight of structural concepts that do not have vast empirical weight data. Unfortunately, the inclusion of detailed finite element analysis into conceptual level design environments has traditionally been prohibitive because of the associated computational expense.

               Recently, there has been significant development of a class of techniques known as Reduced Basis Methods which are able to replicate the results of high fidelity FEM analyses but at a very small fraction of the computational cost. In particular, the Static Condensation Reduced Basis Element (SC-RBE) method is quite attractive because of its added versatility of modeling a wide variety of final configurations with a relatively small dataset. Unfortunately, this strategy has not been leveraged in aerospace structural design and as such, lacks a supporting methodology to enable efficient structural analysis and optimization within this context.

The aim of this work is to develop a methodology that uses the SC-RBE method to enable the efficient structural analysis and optimization of a conventional, transport aircraft wing-box made from advanced composite materials. However, before this methodology can be developed, certain limitations present within the SC-RBE framework have to be remedied. New contributions of this work will include, the development of a modified port-reduced SC-RBE method and an optimization approach that should be especially efficient and suitable for inclusion into conceptual level aircraft design environments.

Committee Members:

Professor Dimitri N. Mavris (Committee Chair, School of Aerospace Engineering)

Professor Graeme J. Kennedy (School of Aerospace Engineering)

Professor Sung Ha Kang (School of Mathematics)