21st Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, Melbourne, Australia, 13-18 September, 1998
Paper ICAS-98-7.2.2

METHODOLOGY FOR CONCEPTUAL DESIGN AND OPTIMISATION OF TRANSPORT AIRCRAFT

Isikveren A. T.
American Airlines, USA

Keywords: conceptual design, optimisation, transport aircraft

This paper presents techniques for conducting and subsequently optimising new transport aircraft designs at the conceptual level with an emphasis placed on turbofan vehicles ranging in size from 19 to 100 passengers as well as business jets. The method is comprised of the discrete operations usually performed for a conventional (intuitive) design process but combines it with a non-hierarchic multidisciplinary optimisation philosophy. A new unified analytical treatment of the design problem is presented which utilises closed form solutions together with transcendental expressions. These methods cover: installed powerplant modelling, high and low speed aerodynamics, minimum control speed limited balanced field estimation, and, the formulation of operational performance characteristics such as definition of speed schedules and techniques for payload-range/sector flight profile optimisation with regards to maximum specific range, minimum fuel, maximum block speed, minimum time, minimum direct operating cost and maximum return on investment. A design study has been performed with a spreadsheet based version of the theory and methodology.

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