Multidisciplinary and multi-fidelity optimization environment for wing integrated design

The Ph.D. program has been focused on the development of a multidisciplinary integrated environment for the design of wing for which large changes in shape are expected to be allowed during the flight in order to be better adapted for the different flight segments. The first phase of study has been dedicated to the investigation of the proper Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) architecture for the integrated management of the design process and a multilevel solution has been proposed and implemented. Such framework involves several disciplinary analysis and optimization loops: in particular aerodynamic analysis, structural analysis, material optimization and mission and performance evaluation are the main components considered for the preliminary design development for such a “morphing” wing. This stage addressed basically the multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity issues. The second phase has been dedicated to the investigation of possible techniques for the reduction of the computational burden that characterizes typically this kind of integrated design processes. For this purpose multi-fidelity analysis techniques have been considered involving the use of surrogate models. In particular the attention has been focused on the study of a proper methodology to build an approximated model for the estimation of aerodynamic coefficients to be used for performance evaluation in the mission optimization stage. In this case a procedure involving variables screening phase, data-fit surrogate models evaluation and assessment phase and a final crucial global correction phase of the best surrogate model has been proposed.