NASA's current research efforts in aircraft design focus on improvements in performance, better fuel efficiency and noise/boom reduction of the next generation commercial aircraft. These design drivers call for investigation of unconventional and revolutionary design concepts for which the empirical structural and aerodynamic equations based on historical database may not be valid. ZONA's innovative modular MDAO sub-framework, once incorporated in the NASA MDAO systems, can provide variable-fidelity and physics-based structural, aerodynamic, and aeroelastic solutions, along with offering a supportive architecture for the solutions for other disciplines computed by the existing analysis codes available in the NASA MDAO systems, thereby solving a complete configuration design and optimization problem. With acceleration of convergence achieved through the POD-based order reduction and design space evolution technique, automated rapid mesh-morphing by ZMORPH, loads and pressure differential provided by ZONAIR, pre/post-analysis processing capability by ZONA-MV and system-level integration using ModelCenter, Phase I+II effort of this project will largely expand NASA's MDAO capability and enable the design of unconventional and revolutionary air vehicles in a computationally efficient and cost effective manner.
The components proposed to be developed in this effort for the MDAO suite are currently non-existent and/or are certainly needed to improve current capabilities of the commercially available MDAO software being used in the industry. Because of its many robust features beneficial to the air vehicle synthesis/ optimization, such as automated mesh generation +morphing capability, unified shape design variable definition for both structural and aerodynamic models, accelerated convergence through order reduction and design space evolution technique, and the streamlined ModelCenter-integrated process for the variable-fidelity structural, aerodynamic and aeroelastic solution generations, ZONA has discovered that the proposed MDAO suite has a unique commercial competitive edge in the air vehicle MDAO software market. ZONA's highly modular MDAO suite, offered as the 'ZONA-MDAO Pak' within Phoenix Integration's ModelCenter, can be adopted by the conceptual design and configuration development departments of airplane manufacturers nationwide and worldwide to develop a wide class of air vehicles such as UAVs/UCAVs, supersonic business jets and transports, advanced transonic transports, fighter aircraft, hypersonic missiles, and winged projectiles.
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