I-Corps: Software for Aircraft Design and Analysis

Michigan Technological University, Houghton MI

Investigators

Abstract

The broader impact and/or commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to implement a software package can improve aircraft designs, especially for high altitude, high wind speed conditions. Aircraft design is interdisciplinary, and important considerations include aerodynamic load computations and external surface design. There are many physical factors and parameters that must be considered in different design stages, such as, 1). Fast conceptual or preliminary designs with approximate parameter estimations; 2). Prototype development; 3) Optimizations. An improved development of an aircraft design can create many benefits, e.g., optimal control surfaces can enhance maneuverability; save long term airplane operation cost; and improve the missile strike accuracy. This software package offers fast and accurate estimations on different performances from the size, geometry, numbers, and locations of small aircraft control surfaces. The package can help aerospace design engineers to perform fast preliminary designs with correct inclusions of physical parameters as well as to perform accurate computations for late stage optimizations. The product may significantly reduce demands on labor, time, space, materials and devices compared to current design methods. This I-Corps project further develops an improved Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling software based on groups of air molecules and their collective behaviors. This overcomes limitations of most CFD packages, which assume dense gas flows, when applied to high altitude applications where air is dilute and rarefication effects should be considered. The process developed here also overcomes typical limitations of single molecule dynamics where the simulation results are accurate but slow, making them impractical for most engineering applications. The simulation techniques developed here can be fast and have rarefication effects properly included. By using this proposed software packages, accurate databases can be established, with many combinations of size, shape, locations, and number of control surfaces. Interpolation functions will be incorporated in the package as well to further increase the computation speed.