Internal combustion (IC) engines that consume hydrocarbon fuels have dominated the propulsion systems of air-vehicles for the first century of aviation. In recent years, however, growing concern over rapid climate changes and national energy security has galvanized the aerospace community into delving into new alternatives that could challenge the dominance of the IC engine. Nevertheless, traditional aircraft sizing methods have significant shortcomings for the design of such unconventionally powered aircraft. First, the methods are specialized for aircraft powered by IC engines, and thus are not flexible enough to assess revolutionary propulsion concepts that produce propulsive thrust through a completely different energy conversion process. Another deficiency associated with the traditional methods is that a user of these methods must rely heavily on experts experience and advice for determining appropriate design margins. However, the introduction of revolutionary propulsion systems and energy sources is very likely to entail an unconventional aircraft configuration, which inexorably disqualifies the conjecture of such connoisseurs as a means of risk management. Motivated by such deficiencies, this dissertation aims at advancing two aspects of aircraft sizing: 1) to develop a generalized aircraft sizing formulation applicable to a wide range of unconventionally powered aircraft concepts and 2) to formulate a probabilistic optimization technique that is able to quantify appropriate design margins that are tailored towards the level of risk deemed acceptable to a decision maker. A more generalized aircraft sizing formulation, named the Architecture Independent Aircraft Sizing Method (AIASM), was developed for sizing revolutionary aircraft powered by alternative energy sources by modifying several assumptions of the traditional aircraft sizing method. Along with advances in deterministic aircraft sizing, a non-deterministic sizing technique, named the Probabilistic Aircraft Sizing Method (PASM), was developed. The method allows one to quantify adequate design margins to account for the various sources of uncertainty via the application of the chance-constrained programming (CCP) strategy to AIASM. In this way, PASM can also provide insights into a good compromise between cost and safety.

Multidisciplinary design optimization of aerospace vehicles has attracted interest of many researchers. Well known aerospace companies are developing tools for the mutlidisciplinary design optimization. However, the multiobjective optimization of the design is a new and important area investigated very little by the researchers. This thesis will examine the approaches to the multiobjective and mutlidisciplinary design optimization of rockets and missiles. In the study, multiobjective optimization method called MC-MOSA will be used.

<p>A conceptual design of a miniature vegetation cutter for use in minefields in southern Lebanon has been developed and the authors have evaluated its mechanical properties focusing on the stress in welded joints using the CAD software <em>Pro/Engineer Wildfire 4.0</em>. The conceptual design has been developed in the field in close cooperation with field staff from MAG Lebanon.</p><p>The requirements from the field specify that the cutter should have a cutting range of 80 cm, be equipped with adjustable covers, weigh less than 200 kg, be fitted to a commercial hydraulic excavator, and have the ability to cut vegetation, bushes and small trees including (olive) trees with a diameter up to 10 cm.</p><p>The miniature cutter is to be manufactured in the field and fitted to a commercial hydraulic ex­cava­tor (Caterpillar 301.6C). It consists of a rotor on which eight cutting blades, alternatively chains, are attached in a helix formation. The cutter is protected by adjustable covers. When in operation, the rotor spins at 750 revolutions per minute whereby the blades cut through the shrubs and bushes in the cutter’s path. The blades are mounted in a T-shape on arms, which are fastened to the rotor by a pin joint between two brackets (each) on the rotor. Blades and arms are to be welded together, as are the brackets to the rotor. These welded joints are the primary focus of the report. 3D CAD models have been created and analysed in <em>PTC Pro/Engineer Wildfire 4.0</em> to ascertain that the stress in the joints will not exceed the yield strength of the weld consumables, which should be 500 MPa. Ideally, the stress in the joints would be half the yield strength.</p><p>Type of bearings and a hydraulic motor have been selected for the cutter. Based on the specifica­tions of the hydraulic motor an approximation of the forces acting on the weld joints in the case of an accidental stop (e.g. collision with a rock) has been calculated, and entered into the CAD software. Also, an approximation of the size (diameter) of branches the cutter would be able to tear apart in the case of branches getting stuck has been calculated and shown to be about 14.6 mm. Based on this, it is estimated that the cutter should be used only in areas where the shrubbery is of 20-30 mm in diameter, maximum. Considering this, and the relative light weight of the cutter, it is not likely that the cutter will be able to cut through the larger olive trees as requested, but it is considered that the tool still could be a valuable asset for mine clearing in Lebanon. In order to cut through thicker trees, it would be necessary to increase the power supply to the cutting system as well as the sturdiness of the cutting parts. Finding the required power and technical solutions for this demands further research which does not fit within the time frame for this report.</p><p>A preliminary weight approximation shows that the cutter will weigh roughly 170 kg, which falls below the limit of 200 kg and leaving some room for the bearings to be added.</p><p>The results from the stress analyses show that the stress in the welded joints falls well below the yield limit of 500 MPa, but not below 250 MPa. Still, the stress in all the welded joints is shown to be less than 300 MPa or at 40 % of the limit, which may still be acceptable. The end user will have to decide whether this is an acceptable safety margin before manufacturing the cutter and if it is not, measures will need to be taken to reinforce the weld joints and try to minimise the stress concentration in them.</p>

In Buchausstellungen begegnen wir Texten, die auf Tonscherben, Papyrus, Pergament oder Papier geschrieben oder gedruckt sind. Die oft nicht sehr großen und nur ausnahmsweise farbigen Objekte werden uns in unterschiedlichen Zusammenhängen vorgeführt, je nach Ausstellungsthema. Kann man über Buchausstellungen und ihre Räume etwas sagen, auch unabhängig vom Thema einer Ausstellung? Die folgenden Überlegungen versuchen das, sowohl abstrakt wie konkret.

<p>This thesis presents the work done to implement new computational tools and methods dedicated to aircraft conceptual design sizing and optimization. These tools have been exercised on different aircraft concepts in order to validate them and assess their relevance and applicability to practical cases.First, a geometry construction protocol has been developed. It is indeed essential to have a geometry description that supports the derivation of all discretizations and idealizations used by the different analysis modules (aerodynamics, weights and balance, stability and control, etc.) for which an aircraft concept is evaluated. The geometry should also be intuitive to the user, general enough to describe a wide array of morphologies and suitable for optimization. All these conditions are fulfilled by an appropriate parameterization of the geometry. In addition, a tool named CADac (Computer Aided Design aircraft) has been created in order to produce automatically a closed and consistent CAD solid model of the designs under study. The produced CAD model is easily meshable and therefore high-fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) computations can be performed effortlessly without need for tedious and time-consuming post-CAD geometry repair.Second, an unsteady vortex-lattice method based on TORNADO has been implemented in order to enlarge to scope of flight conditions that can be analyzed. It has been validated satisfactorily for the sudden acceleration of a flat plate as well as for the static and dynamic derivatives of the Saab 105/SK 60.Finally, a methodology has been developed to compute quickly in a semi-empirical way the buffet envelope of new aircraft geometries at the conceptual stage. The parameters that demonstrate functional sensitivity to buffet onset have been identified and their relative effect quantified. The method uses a combination of simple sweep theory and fractional change theory as well as the buffet onset of a seed aircraft or a provided generic buffet onset to estimate the buffet envelope of any target geometry. The method proves to be flexible and robust enough to predict within mainly 5% (and in any case 9%) the buffet onset for a wide variety of aircrafts, from regional turboprop to long-haul wide body or high-speed business jets.This work was done within the 6^th European framework project SimSAC (Simulating Stability And Control) whose task is to create a multidisciplinary simulation environment named CEASIOM (Computerized Environment for Aircraft Synthesis and Integrated Optimization Methods), oriented toward stability and control and specially suited for aircraft conceptual design sizing and optimization.</p> / SimSAC

<p>This thesis deals with the development of a Conceptual Design Tool for unmanned helicopters, so called VTOL UAVs. The goal of the Design Tool is:</p><p>• Quick results</p><p>• Good accuracy</p><p>• Easy to use</p><p>The two first points of the goal are actually more or less dependent on each other. In almost all cases a high accuracy gives a slow calculator and vice versa. In order to fulfill the goal a compromise between calculation accuracy and calculation time needs to be done.</p><p>To make the Design Tool an easy to use program a graphical user interface is used. The graphical user interface allows the user to systematically work his way thru the program from a fictive mission to a complete design of a helicopter. The pre-requirements on the user have been eliminated to a minimum, but for the advanced user the possibilities to create more specific and complex helicopters are good.</p><p>In order to develop a Conceptual Design Tool the entire helicopter needs to be seen as a complete system. To see the helicopter as a system all of the sub parts of a helicopter need to be studied. The sub parts will be compared against each other and some will be higher prioritized than other.</p><p>The outline of this thesis is that it is possible to make a user friendly Conceptual Design Tool for VTOL UAVs. The design procedure in the Design Tool is relatively simple and the time from start to a complete concept is relatively short. It will also be shown that the calculation results have a good agreement with real world flight test data.</p>

There are always differences between conceptual design estimates and the performance of a final product. These differences may result in constraint violations, which can have severe financial impacts. Such violations may necessitate downstream changes to recover aircraft performance. The ability to estimate the likelihood and impact of late-stage changes is key to mitigating the overall risk of a design. Reliability methods can treat design uncertainty; however, existing methods do not account for aspects of aircraft design such as sizing processes, the design freeze after conceptual design, and late-stage ``mitigation actions'' taken when a performance constraint is violated. By accounting for these elements, new reliability metrics can be developed. In addition to the probability of compliance, the designer can determine the probability of recovery through mitigation actions, which helps determine the true likelihood that a design can meet the requirements. Hypotheses are developed to fill the identified gaps, resulting in Aircraft Recovery through Mitigation & Optimization under Uncertainty for Reliability. ARMOUR augments reliability methods by integrating aircraft sizing, uncertainty margins, and mitigation actions. ARMOUR is demonstrated on the conceptual design of a large civil transport and is exercised to explore previously obscured relationships. The field of probabilistic aircraft design is enhanced by the concurrent quantification of three elements in one design environment: probability of compliance, probability of recovery after failure, and traditional design criteria. ARMOUR enables the identification of designs which both meets reliability goals and optimizes a traditional performance metric, selecting a design that efficiently meets reliability requirements.

This thesis is concerned with the study of how sketch-based systems can be improved to enhance idea generation process in conceptual design stage. It is also concerned with achieving a kind of integration between sketch-based systems and CAD systems to complete the digitization of the design process as sketching phase is still not integrated with other phases due to the different nature of it and the incomplete digitization of sketching phase itself. Previous studies identified three main related issues: sketching process, sketch-based modeling, and the integration between the digitized design phases. Here, the thesis is motivated from the desire to improve sketch-based modeling to support idea generation process but unlike previous studies that only focused on the technical or drawing part of sketching, this thesis attempts to concentrate more on the mental part of the sketching process which play a key role in developing ideas in design. Another motivation of this thesis is to produce a kind of integration between sketch-based systems and CAD systems to enable 3D models produced by sketching to be edited in detailed design stage. As such, there are two main contributions have been addressed in this thesis. The first contribution is the presenting of a new approach in designing sketch-based systems that enable more support for idea generation by separating thinking and developing ideas from the 3D modeling process. This kind of separation allows designers to think freely and concentrate more on their ideas rather than 3D modeling. the second contribution is achieving a kind of integration between gesture-based systems and CAD systems by using an IGES file in exchanging data between systems and a new method to organize data within the file in an order that make it more understood by feature recognition embedded in commercial CAD systems.

Weight and its estimation have a vital impact in the aircraft design process from the very early phases. When the conceptual design configuration of an aircraft has been created, it should ensure that the estimated weight is sufficiently accurate to meet the performance and cost requirements. The estimation of structural weight in early design stages is mostly performed using historical data; however, this approach does not provide reliable weight estimates for unconventional or unique designs or those that employ advanced materials. One solution for improving the accuracy of conceptual level weight estimation is to improve the fidelity of the methodology, geometry models, and loads through the use of Finite Element Methods (FEM). This thesis is intended to demonstrate an initial application of conceptual-level FEM based weight estimation to aircraft wing structure. / text

Biomimetic design uses biological analogies to produce innovative engineering solutions. However, designers face challenges in identifying useful biological analogies and correctly applying the analogies identified to design solutions. To overcome these challenges, this thesis proposes the use of causally related functions in biomimetic design. Causally related functions describe how a desired function is enabled by another function. To support the use of causally related functions, a set of tools was developed. First, the causal relation template and mapping techniques (one-to-one mapping instructions and problem-independent scenario mapping) were devised to assist designers to identify and apply causally related functions from descriptions of biological phenomena. In pen-and-paper experiments with senior undergraduate engineering students, the causal relation template, if used correctly, facilitated the development of design concepts that were analogous to biological phenomena provided as sources of analogy. In addition, the mapping techniques reduced the percentage of participants who made non-analogous associations from biological phenomena to develop design concepts. Another tool developed was the causal relation retrieval method. The method uses syntactic information in natural language sentences to explicitly identify causally related functions. A modified verbal protocol study with graduate engineering students revealed that the retrieval method increased the likelihood of locating biological phenomena relevant to given design problems compared to a single verb-keyword search method. Also, the search matches located with the retrieval method were more likely to facilitate functional association to develop design concepts. These results demonstrate that the knowledge structure of causally related functions can support both the identification of relevant biological phenomena in natural language text and use of analogical reasoning between the biological phenomena and design solutions. The causal relation template and mapping strategies developed contribute to the field of biomimetic design as training methods for designers; and the causal relation retrieval method could serve a technique to bridge the gap between the natural language approach and the modeling approach to biomimetic design.