The ability to quickly fabricate small unmanned aircraft through additive manufacturing methods opens a range of new possibilities for the design and optimisation of these vehicles. In this thesis, we propose a design loop that makes use of surrogate modelling and additive manufacturing to reduce the design and optimisation time of scientific small unmanned aircraft. Additive manufacturing reduces the time and effort required to fabricate a complete aircraft, allowing for rapid design iterations and flight testing. Co-Kriging surrogate models allow data collected from test flights to correct Kriging models trained with numerically simulated data. The resulting model provides physically accurate and computationally cheap aircraft performance predictions. A global optimiser is used to search this model to find an optimal design for a bespoke aircraft. We apply the proposed design loop in a real-world case study. A parameterised joined wing aircraft is optimised to fulfil the mission requirements of a sensorcraft, or a small unmanned aircraft capable of carrying a payload of scientific sensors. Following the proposed design loop, three parametric aircraft were fabricated using additive manufacturing and flight tested. These flight testing data were used to construct a co-Kriging surrogate model capable of being used for the rapid optimisation of future sensorcraft.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:720212 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Paulson, Christopher A. |
| Contributors | Sobester, Andras |
| Publisher | University of Southampton |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/412645/ |
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