Collaborative High Fidelity and High Performance Computing-Based MDO Strategies for Transport Aircraft Design

Aviation is undergoing a transformation, fueled by the Corona pandemic, and methods to evaluate new technologies for more economical and environment-friendly flight in a timelier manner and to enable new aircraft to be designed (almost) exclusively using computers are sought after. The DLR project VicToria brings together disciplinary methods and tools of different fidelity for collaborative multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) of long-range passenger aircraft configurations, necessitating the use of high-performance computing. Three different approaches are being followed to master complex interactions of disciplines and software aspects: an integrated aero-structural wing optimization based on high-fidelity methods, a multi-fidelity gradient-based approach capable of efficiently dealing with many design parameters and many load cases, and a many-discipline highly-parallel approach, which is a novel approach towards computationally demanding and collaboration intensive MDO. The XRF-1, an Airbus provided research aircraft configuration representing a typical long-range wide-body aircraft, is used as a common test case to demonstrate the different MDO strategies. Parametric disciplinary models are used in terms of overall aircraft design synthesis, loads analysis, flutter, structural analysis and optimization, engine design, and aircraft performance. The different MDO strategies are shown to be effective in dealing with complex, real-world MDO problems in a highly collaborative, cross-institutional design environment, involving many disciplinary groups and experts and a mix of commercial and in-house design and analysis software