High-fidelity Aero-Structural Optimisation using Individual Discipline Feasible Strategy

Aero–structural optimisation is a challenging aspect of aircraft design. The state–of–the–art in this field proposes several different techniques, which can be classified by architecture of the algorithm. Choosing among them, mostly depends on the nature of the problem one wants to study and on how the coupling between Aerodynamics and Structures is carried out. The Individual Discipline Feasible (IDF) technique proposes a monolithic approach to the optimisation problem, where the different disciplines are optimised together in a unified framework, but without any direct coupling. This feature is of particular interest for those cases where an interface between the disciplinary analyses is hard to implement, or when it increases significantly the computational cost. However, to guarantee convergence to a physically feasible solution, additional constraints must be defined, and surrogate variables must be introduced. This paper presents an application of the IDF strategy to high–fidelity aero–structural optimisation of a concept tailplane design. With no relevant demonstrations in this area, our results are very promising and indicate an optimised solution is found in few iterations.