The paper provides an overview of the maturity achieved on multi-disciplinary aeroelastic and aero-structural adjoint solvers developed during the European project MADELEINE. The main focus is on relevant industrial test cases specified by Airbus based on the XRF-1 research model, representative of a large passenger aircraft. First a crossvalidation of the computed sensitivities among project partners is presented for both rigid and flexible shape gradients, based on a shared wing shape parametrization prescribed by the aircraft manufacturer. Then studies are performed by considering an increased number of parameters representative of industrial design applications. The benefit of taking flexibility into account is demonstrated by comparing single and multi-point optimization results. Finally an outlook of ongoing aero-structural optimizations exploiting an integrated multidisciplinary feasible strategy is provided.

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With the progress of high-performance computing, computationally expensive high-fidelity methods can be applied early in the design process of an aircraft. This enables Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for the assesment of flight performance, handling qualities, flight loads due to manoeuver or gusts, and stability such as flutter. Those aeroealstic analyses require coupling of disciplines to adequately address the interplay of flexibility, aerodynamic forces and inertia forces. Previous work at the German Aerospace Center have demonstrated the proof of concept for those multidisciplinary analyses. Now, UltraFLoads is a simulation suite in the FlowSimulator ecosystem to offer standardized, multidisciplinary scenarios. UltraFLoads can be used as a tool, as a library and as a framework. This work describes the architecture, the integration layers, which scenarios are available and which equations are used. Three different applications are presented. The first case involves a steady fluid–structure-coupled simulation with geometrically nonlinear deformation. The second case compares the deformation of a simulated elastic, free-flying aircraft with actual flight test data. The last application demonstrates the flight dynamic capabilities with a bank to bank maneuver.

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