Balanced Approach to the Aircraft Design

Aircraft design comprises several disciplines that need to be integrated during the design of a new aircraft to provide qualitative as well as quantitative data for the design candidates. This data then needs to be analyzed through structured design methods to ensure that design requirements are met and design objectives are achieved. A multidisciplinary design and optimization methodology (MDO) has been developed for providing high fidelity design data from Computer Aided Design, Engineering and Manufacturing (CAD, CAE and CAM) Tools for the conceptual design of an aircraft. The methodology provides qualitative and quantitative design data for a number of concepts being considered for a given design problem. Structured design methods, the most effective means for fulfilling the design requirements, are illustrated to be applied with actual design data for the design concepts, thus eliminating arbitrariness that usually shadows their traditional application based on guess work, experience or “intuition”. The concept of Balanced Design was introduced by Stuart Pugh to address qualitative and quantitative aspects of the design in “balanced” manner. Pugh’s method is applied to MALE UAV Design as the MDO methodology provides Qualitative and the Quantitative design data for merging two bounds of the Balanced Design. Creativity Bound is realized through CAD geometry definition whereas CAE tools enable the other bound called Analysis boundary.