Conceptual Design of Boundary Layer Ingesting Aircraft Capturing Aero-Propulsive Coupling

Copyright © 2022 by Jai Ahuja and Dimitri Mavris. Published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc., with permission.Presented as Paper 2021-0112 at the AIAA SciTech 2021 Forum, Virtual Event, January 11–15 and 19–21, 2021.DOI: https://doi.org/10.2514/1.C036654The impacts of boundary layer ingestion on aircraft performance can be modeled using either a decoupled or a coupled approach. Several studies in literature have adopted the former, while some have shown differences between the two approaches for the performance analysis and design refinement of a sized aircraft. This study quantifies the consequences of ignoring aero-propulsive coupling at the aircraft sizing stage of conceptual design. To do so, a parametric and coupled aero-propulsive design methodology is used that leverages surrogate modeling to minimize the expense of computational fluid dynamics in generating estimates of the boundary layer ingestion performance impacts. The method is applied to the design and analysis of two aircraft in the 150 passenger class, with different engine locations. Discrepancies in block fuel burn estimates, as large as 2.15%, were found to occur by ignoring aero-propulsive interactions