Statistical Time and Market Predictive Engineering Design (STAMPED) Techniques for Aerospace Preliminary Design: Regional TurbopropApplication

As aircraft design techniques become more and more automated with greater numbers of more powerful computational machines becoming available, exacting approaches like “knowledge based design” and “knowledge based engineering” (KBE) are becoming quite commonplace. Indeed, the field of KBE has roots stretching back many decades [1-3]. These KBE tools have in the past decade been systematically moved from detailed component design towards the arena of preliminary aircraft design [3-6]. While KBE and other computational tools are compatible with structural optimization with highly defined loads and operational conditions, such techniques are fundamentally challenged when loads are ill defined or when highly nonlinear factors are included. Another issue challenging such tools as they are being integrated into preliminary design is that they highlight a “computational mismatch” in that expensive, computationally costly methods are being used to arrive at the third and fourth significant figure of aircraft weights, when in preliminary design, only two are generally needed or appropriate for the task at hand.