Towards the Industrialization of MDAO
Evolving 1st Generation MDAO to an Industry Ready Level of Maturity
Daniël de Vries (TU Delft - Aerospace Engineering)
Gianfranco la Rocca – Mentor
Simon Binder – Mentor
Imco van Gent – Mentor
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Abstract
Multidisciplinary Design Analysis and Optimization (MDAO) promises major advances in aircraft design. However, judging from todays aircraft, MDAO is clearly not fully embraced by the industry yet. This is due to technical difficulties (coupling incompatible tools) and non-technical barriers (intellectual property).
Recent research, such as the AGILE project, aims at enabling 3rd generation MDO, where collaboration of distributed teams is key. Maturing MDAO is important to eventually make Overall Aircraft Design possible. However, the industry is still in the early days of 1st generation MDO application.
This thesis proposes a new 1st generation MDO 'pipeline' benefiting from the latest tools developed for 3rd generation MDO. This open-source tool-chain makes it easy to connect analyses and include gradient information. It is shown that gradient inclusion yields dramatically reduced computational costs. Rapid (re)configuration and inclusion of gradient information using this pipeline is demonstrated by considering the Sellar problem and a wing optimization.