Summary: | Aircraft are multidisciplinary systems that are challenging to design due to interactions between the subsystems. The relevant disciplines, such as aerodynamic, thermal, and propulsion systems, must be considered simultaneously using a path-dependent formulation to assess aircraft performance accurately. In this paper, we construct a coupled aero-thermal-propulsive-mission multidisciplinary model to optimize supersonic aircraft considering their path-dependent performance. This large-scale optimization problem captures non-intuitive design trades that single disciplinary models and path-independent methods cannot resolve. We present optimal flight profiles for a supersonic aircraft with and without thermal constraints. We find that the optimal flight trajectory depends on thermal system performance, showing the need to optimize considering the path-dependent multidisciplinary interactions.
|