Publications

In the past, aerostructural optimizations have used a single or small number of analyses in cruise to roughly estimate mission performance. This is accurate enough for long missions where the majority of time is spent near a single flight condition in cruise. But for regional and narrowbody aircraft, the fuel burn in climb is a substantial portion of the block fuel burn—traditional methods do not account for this. This work introduces a new approach: mission-based optimization. This approach gives the optimizer detailed information throughout the mission so the optimizer can optimally trade off performance at different flight conditions. The mission is computed by numerically integrating states such as fuel burn across this mission, satisfying force balance at each integration point, and using a physics-based turbofan model.