Performance envelopes for preliminary sizing of aircraft structures
type: CreativeWork
description: Two fundamental stages within aerospace structural design are loads development and sizing. The first deals with the development of all the load cases that an aircraft may encounter in service, whereas the latter is responsible for the design of the structural components required to carry the predicted loads. A significant milestone within the airframe development is the preliminary sizing process. It aims to identify the critical loads driving the design and optimise the aircraft structure for minimum weight. Due to the resource limitations imposed by a large number of load cases and structural design constraints, there exists a gap between the loads development and sizing activities. This results in lengthy and costly design iterations, which hampers the aircraft development process. A novel method to bridge this gap is utilised in this thesis. It is based on the concepts of characteristic loads and performance envelopes. The characteristic loads are a small set of linearly independent loads acting on the aircraft, identified using Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), which can represent all the load cases of interest. Performance envelopes are created within the characteristic load space and define the load bearing capacity of a structure. These two concepts enable the engineer to relate the different aircraft loads with the structural failure constraints. This research aims to further the two concepts, specifically focusing to address the challenges arising from the preliminary sizing process. The first contribution towards improving the state of the art is in the construction of the performance envelope. A robust and efficient strategy is developed to reduce the computational costs of building the envelope. A second novelty is in the development of a framework to update the envelope as the structural design evolves in the sizing process. These two contributions improve the feasibility of industrialisation of the method The third and fourth contribution of this r…
abstract: Two fundamental stages within aerospace structural design are loads development and sizing. The first deals with the development of all the load cases that an aircraft may encounter in service, whereas the latter is responsible for the design of the structural components required to carry the predicted loads. A significant milestone within the airframe development is the preliminary sizing process. It aims to identify the critical loads driving the design and optimise the aircraft structure for minimum weight. Due to the resource limitations imposed by a large number of load cases and structural design constraints, there exists a gap between the loads development and sizing activities. This results in lengthy and costly design iterations, which hampers the aircraft development process. A novel method to bridge this gap is utilised in this thesis. It is based on the concepts of characteristic loads and performance envelopes. The characteristic loads are a small set of linearly independent loads acting on the aircraft, identified using Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), which can represent all the load cases of interest. Performance envelopes are created within the characteristic load space and define the load bearing capacity of a structure. These two concepts enable the engineer to relate the different aircraft loads with the structural failure constraints. This research aims to further the two concepts, specifically focusing to address the challenges arising from the preliminary sizing process. The first contribution towards improving the state of the art is in the construction of the performance envelope. A robust and efficient strategy is developed to reduce the computational costs of building the envelope. A second novelty is in the development of a framework to update the envelope as the structural design evolves in the sizing process. These two contributions improve the feasibility of industrialisation of the method The third and fourth contribution of this r…
author: Sheshanarayana, Sriharsha
language: eng
keywords: Preliminary sizing, Performance envelopes, characteristic loads, aircraft design, aircraft loads, constraint sensitivity, reserve factor
date published: 2020-12
date modified: 2026-07-24T03:55:31Z
provider: Queen's University Belfast
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Queen's University Belfast