Aerodynamic/Stealthy/Structural Multidisciplinary Design Optimization of Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle

An optimization strategy is proposed to deal with the aerodynamic/stealthy/structural multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) issue of unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV). In applying the strategy, the MDO process is divided into two levels, i.e. system level optimization and subsystem level optimization. The system level optimization is to achieve optimized system objective (or multi-objective) through the adjustment of global external configuration design variables. The subsystem level optimization consists of the aerodynamic/stealthy integrated design and the structural optimization. The aerodynamic/stealthy integrated design aims at achieving the minimum aerodynamic drag coefficient under the constraint of stealthy requirement through the adjustment of local external configuration design variables. The structural optimization is to minimize the structural weight by adjusting the dimensions of structural components. A flowchart to implement this strategy is presented. The MDO for a flying-wing configuration of UCAV is employed to illustrate the detailed process of the optimization. The results indicate that the overall process of the surrogate-based two-level optimization strategy can be implemented automatically, and quite reasonable results are obtained.