Overall Preliminary Sizing and Optimization of the Metallic Structures of a PrandtlPlane Civil Transport Aircraft

The paper aims at presenting and summarizing the activities carried out on the structural aspects of a box-wing aircraft, called PrandtlPlane, proposed as a more efficient alternative to present commercial aircraft. The results hereby shown represent the major achievements in preliminary structural design, within the on-going Project PARSIFAL (“Prandtlplane ARchitecture for the Sustainable Improvement of Future AirpLanes”), funded by European Union under the Horizon2020 Program. The paper deals with structural peculiarities of such box-wing aircraft configuration, and presents some methodologies and computational tools, suitable for unconventional aircraft structures, made of metallic materials