Aerostructural Wing Optimization of a Regional Jet Considering Mission Fuel Burn

Abstract

High-fidelity multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) promises rigorous balancing of the multidisciplinary trade-offs inherent to aircraft wings. However, collaborations between academia and industry rarely put MDO to the test on practical design problems. In this work, MDO is applied to the design of a regional jet wing to minimize fuel burn. High-fidelity aerostructural analysis is used to model the wing and capture trade-offs between structural weight and aerodynamic performance. A novel approach is used to calculate fuel burn for climb and descent using a low-fidelity model, improving the relevancy of the optimization results for short-haul missions. A wing-only geometry is used to explore the design space and generate a series of Pareto fronts for different geometric parametrizations. Finally, an aerostructural optimization is conducted with a complete wing-body-tail geometry of an Embraer regional jet. The optimizer increases the wingspan and decreases the sweep of the original wing to achieve a 3.6% decrease in fuel burn.