Strategies in CFD Modeling: Hypersonic Cargo Delivery Gliders Multidisciplinary Design Optimization

Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) is applied to hypersonic cargo delivery gliders in means of determining the ideal geometric shape of a given aircraft based aerodynamic performance. The method utilizes a variable geometry sweep to create different aircraft surface configurations and apply Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to define the aerodynamic characteristics of each aircraft configuration. The software in utilization is STAR-CCM+, which is a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software used to simulate objects and environments operating under real world conditions [1]. Utilizing MDO techniques, we can take the aerodynamic performance of each designed aircraft and give it a flight path to test: launch/boost, post re-entry (continuum flow), glide, landing approach and landing. Through this, the geometries that result in the best metric, i.e. flight range, will point out the designs that are most optimal for a given trajectory. The focus of the paper is the process of the how aircraft design is broken into three phases [2]: (a) conceptual design, (b) pre-liminary design and (c) detailed programable design. Through these phases, a test of overall geometries can be experimented on to understand the flow interactions around the aircraft and how each different geometry performs at each stage of flight to create the most optimize aircraft a given mission.