Preliminary Design of MALE UAV Utilizing High Fidelity CAD/CAE Tools and Design Methods

The ever growing competition as well as sophistication in the technologies poses greater challenges to the aircraft designers in developing comprehensive designs by taking complete lifespan of the aircraft into consideration. The comprehensive product definition is also a major challenge in the aerospace industry due to a large number of competing disciplines involved such as aerodynamics, structures, propulsion, and stability. This deficiency in the product definition leads to the substantial financial losses and considerable delays in launching new aircraft. In order to address this problem at the preliminary design stage, an integrated aircraft design methodology is being developed. The main characteristics of this methodology are threefold; first of all, it integrates the Computer Aided Design and Engineering (CAD/CAE) tools in such a way that their utility becomes practical during the preliminary design stage. Secondly, the design information is extracted from the CAD/CAE tools and laid out for the application of the structured design methods such as Quality Function Deployment and Pugh’s Method of Concept Generation and Selection. Finally, these methods are applied to make the configuration level decisions that play critical role in the overall outcome of the new design. The Pugh’s Method is applied in conjunction with the computations from CAD and CAE tools to generate and select the wing concepts for the design of a Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) UAV.