Publications

The past decades have seen significant advances in the development of tools for the numerical optimization of aircraft wings considering aeroelastic interactions. These aeroelastic optimization tools optimize the structural sizing, and occasionally surface geometry, of a wing, subject to constraints such as structural failure and flutter stability, computed using aeroelastic analyses. Recently, the High-Fidelity Aeroelastic Optimization Benchmark Working Group has been formed to bring together practitioners across the field and compare their methods on a common set of optimization problems based on a benchmark model known as the Simple Transonic Wing. Building on the success of our special session at SciTech 2025, the working group has continued to develop the benchmark problems, adding new constraints to the optimization problems with the aim of producing more realistic designs. In this paper, we present our solution to the latest and most complex of these benchmark problems which includes new constraints on buffet onset, takeoff performance, and ground loads. We find that satisfying these new constraints requires a thinner wing with a larger planform area and a lower aspect ratio compared to our previous results. We also find that designing the wing considering buffet onset increases the wing’s optimum cruise Mach number significantly beyond the value it is optimized to operate at.