A Unified Approach for Multidisciplinary Preliminary Aircraft Design

The multidisciplinary analysis of aircraft configurations is mandatory to assess the benefits of novel aeronautical technologies developed by DLR. An appropriate procedure for this task is being developed within the project TIVA, where an integration framework and a common data exchange format are used to couple numerical analysis tools from multiple disciplines. Using this set of tools, individual process chains can be created and used to evaluate the impact of new technologies. This paper consists of three main parts. The first one provides a brief overview of concept and structure of the new data exchange file format CPACS. The second part focuses on the integration framework, discussing its requirements and selection process. Further on, it describes the extensions that were necessary to adopt the framework to CPACS usage. The third part of this paper presents an example of a simple aero-structural tool chain for wing-box sizing and the way towards future applications