21st Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, Melbourne, Australia, 13-18 September, 1998
Paper ICAS-98-4.2.3

AIRFRAME CONFIGURATION DESIGN USING CONSTRAINT PROPAGATION TECHNIQUE CASE WING STRUCTURE

Kuntjoro W.
Institute of Technology, Bandung, Indonesia

Keywords: airframe configuration design, constraint propagation, wing structure

Design is an iterative process involving synthesis and analysis. The development of airframe design, especially in its early/preliminary stage, demands flexibility in its process. Likewise there are many configuration modifications according to its needs. As a configuration is directly related to structural responses, any changes in configuration need structural analysis to check for new responses. Many design iterations are needed and a lot of time is spent for this. A design tool is needed to support the structural designers to design airframe configuration. The developed tool needs exploiting simple but reasonably accurate analysis methods. In addition, a flexible computer programming technique is needed to handle the required design modifications. Conventional sequential programming is not able to handle innovations effectively, which are needed in a configuration design phase. Symbolic processing techniques such as constraint propagation and object-oriented programming provide the needed flexibility. This paper will describe the development of airframe design methodology, which involves configuration changes. Constraint propagation and object-oriented techniques are utilized in the method development. A computer program has been written which deals with the design of wing structure. Some results of wing design cases will be presented in this paper.

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