Initial Design and Evaluation of a Novel Concept Regional Aircraft

A type of blended-wing-body (BWB) aircraft is expected to be next generation airliner. While many studies for BWB has been performed for a large scale aircraft, an aircraft which is for regional jet is also expected. Such aircraft would be small (about 100-300 seats). In the development of such aircraft, BWB should be also discussed because it has aerodynamic advantage compared with conventional aircrafts. Therefore, the aerodynamic design optimization for a small size BWB is required for conceptual design. In this study, an initial BWB which has 150 seats configuration is designed using genetic algorithm (GA). Three cross sections are optimized under constraint of elliptic span loading. Three dimensional unstructured Navier-Stokes solver is applied to evaluate the aerodynamic performance of BWB initial design.