Barbara Sampaio Felix
(Advisor: Prof. Dimitri Mavris)

will defend a doctoral thesis entitled,

A Methodology for Design Space Exploration of Novel Supersonic Aircraft using High-Fidelity Aerodynamic Analysis

on

Monday, March 25 at 1:00 PM

in the
Collaborative Visualization Environment (CoVE)

Weber Space Science and Technology Building (SST II)
and

Teams (Virtually)

Meeting ID: 249 416 963 716

Passcode: zRtvU6

Abstract
The increase in the market share for ultra-high-net-worth individuals prompted research institutions and commercial organizations to design a novel Supersonic Transport (SST). The design of these vehicles follows the traditional aircraft design process, in which Design Space Exploration (DSE) is used to identify the geometries expected to achieve the project requirements. For this analysis, a database of vehicle aerodynamic characteristics as a function of operating conditions and geometry design parameters is needed. Due to the need to evaluate thousands of vehicle geometries in a timely manner, lower-fidelity models are commonly used to generate the necessary data in conceptual design. These models are calibrated using empirical databases to improve their accuracy. However, the database of commercial supersonic vehicles is sparse. Thus, decisions made using these models present a risk to the system design. For this reason designers aim to use higher-fidelity numerical simulations for aircraft conceptual design. Nonetheless, the computational resources demanded by these models hinders their use in large scale. Consequently the literature has not yet developed a methodology to obtain a parametric representation of the aerodynamic tables at the proper level of fidelity and computational allocation suitable for SST DSE in early design. Hence, the goal of this dissertation is to enable the use of the expensive aerodynamic numerical models in conceptual design applications.  

The combined use of data-fusion and Reduced Order Models (ROM) techniques to approximate the aerodynamic drag polar was studied to accomplish this research objective. The findings obtained in the dissertation lead to the development of a ROM-based Multi-Fidelity Drag Polar Approximation. This method uses data-fusion techniques to approximate the drag coefficient of a fixed aircraft geometry. This surrogate model is used to generate the drag polar for the same vehicle. Using this procedure, a database of the aerodynamic tables can be obtained and used to train a parametric ROM representation of SST drag polars. The use of the developed methodology to predict SST aerodynamic characteristics in conceptual design studies was compared to the state-of-the-art approach for SST design using high-fidelity aerodynamic models. The results reveal that the designs generated using the developed method had improved performance metrics when compared to the aircraft obtained using the benchmark approach. Furthermore, the developed drag polar approximation can be quickly evaluated on a multi-disciplinary environment, which increases the designers knowledge on key vehicle-level characteristics and decreases the design risk of novel SSTs.

Committee

• Prof. Dimitri Mavris – School of Aerospace Engineering (Advisor)
• Prof. Daniel Schrage – School of Aerospace Engineering
• Prof. Lakshmi Sankar – School of Aerospace Engineering
• Dr. Jimmy Tai – School of Aerospace Engineering
• Dr. Sriram Rallabhandi – NASA Langley Research Center