Browsing by Author "Holden, Carren"

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    Aerodynamic and cost modelling for aircraft in a multi-disciplinary design context.
    (Cranfield University, 2015-12) Di Pasquale, Davide; Savill, Mark A.; Kipouros, Timoleon; Holden, Carren
    A challenge for the scientific community is to adapt to and exploit the trend towards greater multidisciplinary focus in research and technology. This work is concerned with multi-disciplinary design for whole aircraft configuration, including aero performance and financial considerations jointly for an aircraft program. A Multi-Disciplinary (MD) approach is required to increase the robustness of the preliminary design data and to realise the overall aircraft performance objectives within the required timescales. A pre-requisite for such an approach is the existence of efficient and fully integrated processes. For this purpose an automatic aero high-speed analysis framework has been developed and integrated using a commercial integration/building environment. Starting from the geometry input, it automatically generates aero data for loads in a timescale consistent with level requirement, which can afterwards be integrated into the overall multi-disciplinary process. A 3D Aero-solution chain has been implemented as a high-speed aerodynamic evaluation capability, and although there is not yet a complementary fully automated Aerodynamic design process, two integrated systems to perform multi-objective optimisation have been developed using different optimisation approaches. In addition to achieving good aircraft performance, reducing cost may be essential for manufacturer survival in today's competitive market. There is thus a strong need to understand the cost associated with different competing concepts and this could be addressed by incorporating cost estimation in the design process along with other analyses to achieve economic and efficient aircraft. For this reason a pre-existing cost model has been examined, tested, improved, and new features added. Afterwards, the cost suite has been integrated using an integration framework and automatically linked with external domains, providing a capability to take input from other domain tool sets. In this way the cost model could be implemented in a multi-disciplinary process allowing a trade-off between weight, aero performance and cost. Additionally, studies have been performed that link aerodynamic characteristics with cost figures and reinforce the importance of considering aerodynamic, structural and cost disciplines simultaneously. The proposed work therefore offers a strong basis for further development. The modularity of the aero optimisation framework already allows the application of such techniques to real engineering test cases, and, in future, could be combined with the 3D aero solution chain developed. In order to further reduce design wall-clock time the present multi- level parallelisation could also be deployed within a more rapid multi-fidelity approach. Finally the 3D aero-solution chain could be improved by directly incorporating a module to generate aero data for performance, and linking this to the cost suite informed by the same geometrical variables.
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    ItemOpen Access
    Aircraft cost modelling, integrated in a multidisciplinary design context
    (Science Publishing Group, 2019-12-17) Di Pasquale, Davide; Gore, David; Savill, Mark A.; Kipouros, Timoleon; Holden, Carren
    Most of the current cost models focus on a particular manufacturing process or a specific maintenance aspect, therefore not providing the whole picture. The main challenge in modelling the manufacturing cost, associated to a new aircraft at the initial design stage, is to examine all the cost features and the way to link them into the decision making process. It is important to understand the cost related to different competing designs, and this can be tackled by including cost estimation in the design process. Estimating the cost at the early design stage is paramount to reduce the life cycle cost of the aircraft. This paper presents the development of a new methodology for the generation of a cost estimation approach for preliminary aircraft design in a multidisciplinary environment. The framework is able to capture the design attributes that drive the cost allowing a designer to assess cost changes with respect to different design configurations. The cost model is built in Excel using a Visual Basic interface and it is integrated within Model Centre platform, where it can be treated as a component of a computational design process. The paper concludes by presenting the results from a real wing trade-off study that includes all the components of a complete design system.