Multidisciplinary Conceptual Design of a UCAV Configuration

Typically, aircraft design is driven by a number of standard criteria, mainly performance, weight and range and, for civil and increasingly for military applications, costs. Drivers for UCAV configuration concepts, however, go beyond those classical optimization criteria. Among the most important issues are questions of visibility, i. e. radar and infrared signature. Those decisive factors might become drivers for the overall aircraft configuration, meaning for example the outer shape of the aircraft, the use of materials, and the position of engines. In the DLR project UCAV 2010, several DLR institutes combined their know-how for the development of tools and processes for multidisciplinary design and evaluation of unconventional configurations. The configuration investigated is the so-called DLR-F17 configuration, which has also been proposed by EADS-MAS and DLR to the NATO/RTO AVT-161 Task Group “Assessment of Stability and Control Prediction Methods for NATO Air and Sea Vehicles”. For variants of the configuration, wind tunnel experiments were performed, and a study on conceptual design, multidisciplinary analysis and optimization, has been conducted. In this study, a parameterized structural model for the design process has been set up, with a special focus on aeroelastic investigations. An in-house process has been used for that purpose which will be presented in the paper. Tools and processes of the various partners were combined in a work flow based on ModelCenter. A data base of the aircraft design data in a common XLM format, CPACS, has been used. Analysis and optimization loops were defined for several applications and criteria. The paper gives an overview over the process and presents some results