Coleby Friedland
(Advisor: Prof. Mavris]

will defend a doctoral thesis entitled,

A Methodology for Evaluating the Performance of Tow-Steered Composite Technology Over a Range of Planform Configurations

On

Thursday, June 3 at 2:00 p.m. EDT
https://bluejeans.com/629336000

Abstract
Tow-steered composite technology allows for composite fibers to be arranged in customized curving paths rather than in conventional straight lines. This additional design freedom can provide passive load alleviation and increased load path efficiency, which can lead to reduced structural weight, higher wing aspect ratio, and ultimately better vehicle performance. To best take advantage of this technology the weight reduction should be accounted for during the conceptual design stage, when the vehicle’s configuration is still fluid. Since the technology effect could depend on the planform it must be assessed across the range of potential planforms, motivating the development of the thesis methodology.

Evaluating tow steering’s technology benefit presents a challenge: due to a lack of historical data the effects must be quantified with parametric physics-based analysis, incurring both development and computational expenses. Additionally, determining the benefit requires repeatedly performing the analysis to solve a high-dimensional constrained optimization problem.

In order to better leverage existing weight estimation programs and lessen the impact of computational expense the methodology pursues a surrogate modeling approach. Two main research focuses were addressed while developing the methodology. The first explored how to cope with the large number of dimensions when making the surrogate and applied an active subspace approach to attempt to reduce the dimensionality of the associated constrained optimization problem. The second focus investigated how to most efficiently collect data to build the surrogate and led to the development of an adaptive sampling technique for families of related optimization problems.

The findings from these efforts were synthesized to form the thesis methodology, which was then demonstrated in an example use case. The results from this use case were examined to assess the methodology’s successes and limitations, and to provide insight into the behavior of tow-steered composites.

Committee

• Prof. Dimitri Mavris – School of Aerospace Engineering (advisor)
• Prof. Graeme Kennedy – School of Aerospace Engineering
• Prof. Julian Rimoli – School of Aerospace Engineering
• Dr. Chung Lee – School of Aerospace Engineering

Dr. Jesse Quinlan – Senior Aerospace Engineer, NASA Langley Research Center