Global-local multidisciplinary optimisation of aircrafts

The design optimisation of aerostructures is largely based on Multidisciplinary Design Optimisation (MDO), which is a tool used by the aircraft industry to size primary structures: wings, large portions of the fuselage or even an entire aircraft. This work extends an existing MDO procedure for aircraft design to consider the sizing of separately modelled, detailed features. In order to minimise the additional computational cost, this involves the implementation of a global-local analysis and an ad-hoc semi-analytical coupled sensitivity analysis. The proposed global-local MDO leads to more reliable design solutions without incurring significant computational costs.