Development of Multidisciplinary, Multi-Fidelity Analysis and Integration of Aerospace Vehicles

Current aircraft design approaches incorporate the use of many high fidelity models for point solutions of individual disciplines. Sophisticated model integration techniques are not yet readily available and a significant amount of individual discipline stovepiping exists. Individual handoffs of point solutions between disciplines often results in repeated individual data interpretations.  These interpretations often lead to erroneous decisions and/or add-in design conservatism. The technical goals of the Phase I will be to develop and demonstrate a methodology to combine multidisciplinary models and then propagate model, measurement and statistical uncertainty to quantify total synthesis error.  A demonstration will be conducted on an aircraft design model combining multiple levels of aerodynamic loading, stress analysis and structural reliability. The Phase I framework will be shown to decompose the design analysis into the multiple scales, allowing the complexity of the design of a structural component to be properly assessed. The fully-probabilistic models assess the uncertainty in design characteristics to determine the statistical distribution of the response throughout the system. BENEFIT: The demonstration from Phase I will be a gateway into expanding the framework for the Phase II program.  The focus will be expanded from depot level inspection intervals to a full suite of interdisciplinary design tools.  The structure of this framework will support the system engineering processes typically used by military and commercial aircraft OEMs.  In these processes, high level requirements for performance and affordability are decomposed into high level and detail level requirements. Developing visual relationships between generalized key parameters will allow the framework to be applied to development programs for any airframe. It is anticipated that the capabilities developed from this proposal can be integrated as enhancement to the existing airframe design systems and software.)