Structural Development of an Eco-Efficient Commercial Aircraft

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Aviation is one of the fastest growing sources of Greenhouse Gases (GHG). Currently, the sector accounts for 4.9% of worldwide GHG emissions. Moreover, this situation is not sustainable as in a 2014 report, Boeing indicated that demand for air travel is projected to increase at 5.4% a year until 2033. This situation emphasize our need to develop ecological and economical civil aircraft. A step change towards that goal may be realized through designing novel aircraft configurations and significantly reducing aircraft weight. Blended Wing Body (BWB) configuration is proposed for next generation of airliners due to its fuel efficiency. Formerly, I developed structural modeling and analysis methodologies addressing airframe complexity of BWB aircraft. Currently, I am turning my attention to aircraft weight which considerably affects its environmental effectiveness. I propose to build airframe primary structures using additively manufactured lattice materials. However, with expected weight reduction and consequent airframe flexibility, it is critical to develop high fidelity design loads at all stages of structural analysis taking into consideration airframe geometrical and inertial non-linearity and their effect on aircraft aeroelastic response and flight dynamics. Notable efforts are made toward developing aircraft with minimized weight. However, most of existing developments considered a deterministic set of critical loads for structural optimization. Nevertheless, aircraft design is multidisciplinary. Structural modification due to optimization results in new mass and stiffness distribution that changes aircraft dynamic response and loads. This led other researchers to consider uncertainties in loads which ultimately generate aircraft design with off-optimal performance. In fact, this critical setback results in long delays in aircraft development programs in Canadian aerospace industry which costs our economy billions of dollars. There, structural optimization at detailed design is conducted using critical load cases generated by preliminary aircraft model while certification loads are generated employing aircraft optimized model. Loads generated by the latter must be lower than those of the former which is not often the case. To overcome this issue, I propose to integrate aircraft loads analysis into its structural optimization process. While this suggest a computationally expensive route, an efficient algorithm will be developed to determine type of maneuvers that will generate critical loads based on a given mass and stiffness distribution without the need to run a full range of loads analyses. If successful, it will reduce size of loads analysis drastically making proposed process feasible. The new process will be developed with industrial standards and will be used for multiscale optimization of airframe made of additively manufactured lattice materials.