A fidelity-fusion approach to the environmentally driven design of novel aircraft configurations

为了使预计的全球航空旅行增长可持续，未来飞机必须在环境绩效方面取得显着改善。主导了 60 年的管翼设计无法满足这一需求：需要新颖的方法。这些年来，工程分析领域取得了长足的进步；对于设计综合来说则不然。需要采用变革性方法来有效利用分析代码，将广泛的设计空间搜索与最先进的设计细化无缝结合起来。实现这一点的关键因素是多保真方法的开发。现有技术通常受到默认假设的限制，即一种（通常是最复杂的）保真度代表“真理”，然后采用各种方法来使更简单且计算成本更低的代码来模仿该真理，从而促进实际设计工作所需的加速。该项目以 CUED 中开发的经过验证的多保真度方法为基础，旨在以保真度融合方法混合工具，使每个工具都能充分发挥其优势。这种学科盲技术应该能够将设计过程加速至少一个数量级，使紧密耦合的多学科设计实际上可以进行高保真分析。这种技术的潜在应用范围很广。这里的主要测试案例将是新型未来飞机配置的环境驱动设计。

For the projected increases in global air travel to be sustainable future aircraft must offer significant improvements in environmental performance. The tubeand- wings design that has dominated for 60 years cannot service this need: novel approaches are required. In those years great strides that have been made in engineering analysis; the same cannot be said for design synthesis. Transformative methods are required to effectively harness analysis codes, seamlessly combining wide-ranging design space search with state-of-the-art design refinement. A key enabler for this is the development of multi-fidelity methods. Existing techniques are often limited by the tacit assumption that one (typically the most complex) fidelity represents "truth", with a variety of methods then employed to enable simpler and computationally cheaper codes to mimic that truth, hence facilitating the speed-up necessary for practical design work. This project, building on proven multi-fidelity methods developed in CUED, will aim to blend tools in a fidelity-fusion approach, allowing each to fully play to its strengths. This discipline-blind technique should provide at least an order of magnitude speed-up of the design process, rendering tightly coupled multidisciplinary designs practically accessible to high-fidelity analysis. The potential applications of such a technique are wide ranging; the principal test case here will be the environmentally driven design of novel future aircraft configurations.