Desenvolvimento de fuselagem de avião

Infotech@Aerospace 26 - 29 September 2005, Arlington, Virginia

AIAA 2005-7079

Conceptual Design of UAV Airframes Using a Generic Geometry Service
Andr´s S´bester∗, Andy J. Keane† a o James Scanlan‡ Neil W. Bressloff§ , University of Southampton, Southampton, Hampshire, SO17 1BJ, UK
With the increased freedom in layout selection possible when designing an Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) concept (compared, for example, to the relatively constrained and mature world of commercial airliner design), comes the significant challenge of building a geometry engine that will provide the variety of airframe models demanded by the highly global nature of the design search. In order to enable multidisciplinary trade-off studies, both an external surface and an internal structure are required – we use a single, generic model to supply these, in the form of a parametric geometry residing in a commercial CAD tool. In addition to discussing the challenges of offering a truly flexible geometry service, we also delve into the UAV-specific issues of the initial sizing of the model. A wealth of statistical data provides one of the traditional handholds for this step in manned aircraft conceptual design – we discuss the applicability of such statistical approaches to their unmanned counterparts.

I. Introduction

T

HE techniques of aircraft conceptual design have come a long way over the first century of flight. The design algorithms advocated by modern textbooks1–3 are distillations of a vast

body of collective engineering experience and are underpinned by a wealth of design, manufacture and flight data. However, the knowledge base that lies at their foundation, though very broad, is inevitably biased towards the aircraft categories that form the bulk of today’s commercial and military fleets and the workflows of these design processes are also better suited to certain applications than to others. One of the roads less well traveled is the design of unmanned air systems and this is