Aeroelastic Tailoring Of The Composite Wing Structure Via Shape Function Approach

This paper investigates the functionality of applying a Bilinear Lagrange shape function to create the design variables for aeroelastic tailoring of a composite wing structure. Comparing to the elementbased design variable approach which may generate a non-smooth thickness distribution on skin/spar, the shape function approach assumes that the thickness distribution on a wing skin or along a spar can be superimposed by a set of shape functions. In this way, the design variables become the coefficients of the shape functions. As a result, after the optimizer solves these coefficients to achieve an optimized structure, the thickness on each element can be determined by superimposing the shape function together, and the thickness distribution is also smooth. Based on a model of transport aircraft, application of the shape function approach to the aeroelastic optimization of composite wing structure is designed and analyzed, with different shape functions setting and flutter constraints, respectively. The optimization results demonstrate that the shape function approach is an efficient approach to be used in the structure sizing problems.