Slender flight vehicle multidisciplinary design optimization considering aeroelasticity

Slender flight vehicle shows different characteristics under the consideration of aeroelasticity, such as in structural modeling, control system and flight dynamics, etc. Therefore, design optimization task of the slender flight vehicle is a more complex multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) problem compared with the rigid one. In this paper, the MDO problem of the slender flight vehicle involving structure, aeroelasticity, control, and trajectory disciplines is formulated to minimize the flight vehicle total mass with a number of practical constraints. Since the structural finite element analysis model and trajectory simulation model are computationally expensive, the Kriging metamodel is applied to assist the MDO process with moderate computational cost by approximating the objective function and constraints separately. Then, genetic algorithm is adopted to solve the MDO problem. The optimization results illustrate that the flight vehicle total mass is decreased by 20kg, which demonstrates the effectiveness and practicability of Kriging surrogate model-based design optimization method in solving engineering design optimization problems.