Goal of the internal department project iDEAL (inverse Design for Early Aircraft Layout) is the development and demonstration of new processes and methods for a fast identification of the global design optimum during the conceptual design. The optimisation loop of the new process uses rapid design methods with low accuracy and includes all relevant disciplines for early pre-selection of new aircraft and moveables concepts, besides others also system and certification issues. This allows the reduction of the solution domain e.g. for unconventional aircraft and moveables configurations as input for detailed but time consuming analysis. The aim of the iDEAL approach is a system design method with a continuous tool chain which allows
The starting point of the approach is a rough pre-design with high parameter uncertainty (e.g. aerodynamic parameters) compared to the state-of-the-art design process. It is important to assess the impact of the new design on systems as well as the impact of new system concepts on the overall aircraft design in an early design phase to pre-select candidate configurations. Therefore a multi-step approach including a rapid pre-design and assessment of the overall configuration is performed. This multi-disciplinary pre-design includes aerodynamic, structure, systems and flight dynamic calculations. Based on use cases, different calculation methods with varying accuracy are used. The processes as well as the new design and validation methods are defined in close cooperation with industrial partners (e.g. Airbus). This guarantees that the method is applicable in research and in industrial design processes.
The applicability and potential of the new approach is demonstrated with two use cases: configurations using “multifunctional flight control” and “active flow control systems”. On the one hand the merging of primary and secondary flight control systems into new multifunctional flight control shows promising optimisation potentials and it yields additional freedom of degrees in the design process (e.g. regarding kinematics and actuation). On the other hand laminar flow control systems are able to reduce the friction drag of aircraft and thus optimise the fuel consumption.