Nonplanar wing configurations promise a significant improvement of aerodynamic efficiency and are therefore currently investigated for future aircraft configurations. A reliable mass prediction for a new wing configuration is of great importance in preliminary aircraft design in order to enable a holistic assessment of potential benefits and drawbacks. In this thesis a generic numerical modeling approach for arbitrary unconventional wing configurations is developed and a simulation tool for their evaluation and mass prediction is implemented. The wingbox is modeled with a nonlinear finite element beam which is coupled to different low-fidelity aerodynamic methods obtaining a quasi-static aeroelastic model that considers the redistribution of aerodynamic forces due to deformation. For the preliminary design of the wingbox various critical loading conditions according to the Federal Aviation Regulations are taken into account. The simulation tool is validated for a range of existing aircraft types. Additionally, two unconventional configurations, the C-wing and the box-wing, are analyzed. The outlook provides suggestions for extensions and further development of the simulation tool as well as possible model refinements.

It is aim of this thesis to develop a potential ow solver for unsteady aerodynamics in MATLAB environment. In order to achieve this target a vortex lattice method based has been developed. The validation of this program involves two dierent stages. Initially, it is compared with classical experiments and a well tested code. In a second step, the program is compared with wind tunnel experiments for two dierent aircraft's con gurations, classical and with canard. In the end it will be demonstrated that the present method achieves good agreement in both stages.

This report concerns my internship at EADS Astrium, in the A5 development mechanical loads section, between January 10 and July 8, 2011. There, engineers work with several software such as ADAMS and PERMAS. This internship showed that it is possible to use PERMAS models in an ADAMS simulation by exporting-importing them. Simulations on ADAMS may become much more time consuming and an industrial use of this method is not possible before some improvements on the interface software have been done.

This report, along with Laurent Gourc’s and Ben Marchant’s reports, presents the work done on the development of the new AcBuilder, realized for CEASIOM. CEASIOM is a package of different modules, developed as part of the SimSAC project, which aims to Simulate Stability And Control Characteristics for Use in Conceptual Design. First, the CEASIOM software is introduced in the context of the SimSAC project and, to know where the development of the aircraft builder tool (AcBuilder) is, an overview of the previous version is shown. Then, based on the issues noticed by the users and the programmers of CEASIOM, the goals of the project are presented in listing some modifications and improvements to bring to the software. Secondly, the document treats about the requirements for the new AcBuilder development in order to reach the goals of the project. Those requirements come from both the programming languages used (Matlab and Java) and from the technical parts of the project (geometrical construction of aircraft). Finally, this report presents the new AcBuilder tool, its new design interface, its new functionalities and the remaining improvements to implement in order to make the module compatible with the changes brought by the new requirements.

To reduce the product life cost of aircrafts, the conversion of major load bearing components from aluminium to carbon fibre reinforced plastics have been proposed. Large load bearing components require significantly thicker composite laminates than conventional. These ‘Ultra-Thick Laminates’ require studies into the out-of-plane behavioural and material properties before it can be used commercially. Cohesive Zone Modelling and Arcan empirical testing are chosen to help investigate these properties and behaviour of Ultra Thick Laminates. The Cohesive Zone Modelling method in the commercial FE-software, MSC.Marc Mentat, is validated by comparing results with standardized thin coupon tests prior to further simulation. Arcan tests are to provide material properties to improve accuracy of simulations. However, Arcan test rigs designed prior to the start of this thesis was not suitable for providing correct data and adjustments to the test rigs are needed. Alternatives to the Arcan test have been proposed and considerations of these tests are underway. Nevertheless, Cohesive Zone Modelling is applied to a realistic Ultra Thick Laminates component with the available material properties to provide context. The Cohesive Zone Modelling has shown to be accurate at predicting the behaviour of delamination onset, but the load-displacement predictions were not as accurate in the Ultra Thick Laminates component as in the Cohesive Zone Modelling validations. The sources of discrepancies in results are conceptualized and the Cohesive Zone Modelling remains a viable and potentially powerful method in delamination analysis. However, more development is required in the implementation of Cohesive Zone Modelling for larger components, such as Ultra Thick Laminates components, for Cohesive Zone Modelling to become a robust and standard analytical practice.

The Tahitian company ‘Electricité de Tahiti’operates two out of eight power groups named G7P and G8P equipped with SCR units to limit the pollution of these groups.The real impact of these units is to be assessed. By using an atmospheric dispersion model called AERMOD,it is shown that the results are very similar with and without the SCR units, as the heights of the chimneys and the wind profile of the valley induce a good dispersion of the fumes for these two groups.

This project presents the work performed within the aerodynamics department of Airbus Operation SAS inToulouse through a ve months master thesis. This department works with the industrialization and the use of tools developed by laboratories to perform CFD aerodynamic simulations. The primary purpose of the present work was to support the development of gust analysis methods based on CFD. A new gust model has been developed and integrated to the aerodynamic solver elsA.This solver has been used in order to compute the unsteady aerodynamic simulations for both gust loads and forced motions with CFD. The results were then compared with those from a Doublet Lattice Method computation for validation. Once the validation phase was ended with good agreement between the two methods, a Chimera simulation has been carried out.

Finding the correct integers is the key to high precision range measurements. This has been an issue of investigation since the early 1980’s and many different techniques have been developed, none of them can guarantee to resolve the correct integers in 100% of the cases(Kim & Langley, 2000) though. This thesis focuses on a new approach for Integer Ambiguity Resolution (IAR), using a geometric approach and Interval Analysis (IA). The new method can guarantee that if all measurement errors are bounded by the interval bands the correct integers will always be found. Depending on the width of the interval bands though, there may be more than one solution. The research objective of the thesis is to determine if the Interval Based Integer Am-biguity Resolution (IBIAR) method can be used for accurate attitude determination with only one remaining (correct) solution. Earlier results using the Bounded integer ambiguity resolution using interval analysis (BOUNDS) algorithm (van Kampen, 2010) have shown that one solution can not be obtained for all epochs when applied to flight data from a Cessna Citation II research airplane equipped with three antennas. The analysis did not make use of two frequencies, comparing the baseline orientations and adding an extra antenna though. These aspects are added to the BOUNDS algorithm in order to potentially reduce the number of solutions. Further the effects of the noise on both the carrier phase measurements and baseline lengths are investigated. All simulations are done off line as no real flight data is available for the test configurations. The simulations are loosely based on the Cessna Citation II research airplane belonging to the Dutch National Aerospace Laboratory (NLR) and Delft University of Technology (DUT). For all simulations the correct solution is bounded by the noise levels, which means that the BOUNDS algorithm theoretically always finds the correct solution. Further it is assumed that there are no multipath effects, no restrictions on the attitude angles the airplane can fly with, that the antennas always have a clear view of the satellites and the cut off angle is zero degrees. The conclusion of the thesis is that the IBIAR method can be used for attitude determination where one (correct) solution remains but the accuracy of the solution is low. The thesis gives recommendations on how to improve the accuracy of the attitude angles.

System-of-Systems (SoS) are all around us and are becoming more common in today’s highly interconnected world. Systems are connected with other systems and have strong dependencies with their operational environments. This leads to an increased level of complexity and risk during product development. A holistic view, and an SoS perspective, is consequently needed in order to develop an early understanding of the available design spaces for new system solutions. This thesis suggests a method that has been developed for this purpose, and to meet the demand for a more holistic product development. Overall, the method consists of two correlated approaches that show how a design space for SoSs can be generated and later processed with, for example, design space reductions. Search and Rescue (SAR) operations have been used as examples of typical SoSs throughout this work and in the development of the presented method. An architecture framework has been used to introduce a standardized and consistent way of understanding the relationships that exist between needs, capabilities and functions. This approach can consequently be used to generate a design space of functions to be performed to meet the overarching needs of an SoS. The second approach has been based on ontology and description logic reasoning. Ontology has here been used to represent an SoS design space with, for example, available SAR assets and their relationships with the operational environment. An SoS representation in an ontology model introduces additional expressiveness and the design space processing capabilities needed for a holistic design process and product development. Based on these results, this thesis and its suggested method and approaches contribute to holistic product development from an SoS perspective. / <p>Additional funding agencies: Saab Aeronautics.</p>

The steadily increasing amount of air transportation in the field of manned and unmanned aviation, as well as new requirements induced by technological innovations cause more and more complex avionic system developments. One of the most important safety requirements in aviation is the avoid-ance of mid-air collisions. In order to minimize such dramatic events, commercial manned aircraft are equipped with the “Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS)”to support the pilots of both endangered aircraft by traffic advisories. In the booming field of unmanned aviation, collision avoidance needs to be autonomous, which will achieved by complex “Sense and Avoid” systems. Com-bining information from multiple detection sensors to minimize information uncertainties and neglect the disadvantages of each sensor as a single system is the base for an operational S&amp;A system for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The aircraft will use existing traffic instruments such as a tran-sponder for the reception of automatic dependent surveillance – broadcast (ADS-B) data from other aircraft, TCAS and additional electro-optic and radar-based sensors to compensate the lack of an on-board pilot. All this data can be used in a logical composition to provide the UAV a better situational awareness of the airspace and to avoid an intruding aircraft in case of emergency. To support the development of a “Sense and Avoid” system, the company Airbus Defence and Space is developing a dedicated simulation environment. It simulates collision scenarios between aircrafts to integrate, verify and validate the system under development. At this point the mathematical models of the sensors need to be integrated in the simulation environment in order to increase the degree of realism. As a contribution for further completion of the system, this master thesis is concerned with the integration of the existing models, implementation and improvement of missing models, visualization of this system to the PIC and the presentation to Airbus D&amp;S’s customer.