Investigation of wing structure layout of aerospace plane based on the finite element method

Abstract

The aerospace plane is an innovative kind of reusable aircraft, which is able to reach the low earth orbit flying like the conventional plane. Two kinds of aerospace plane wing structures are designed and parameterized for the delta wing with a strake, one of which is an equal percentage multi-web structure, and the other is a parallel multi-web structure. The two types of structure layouts were analyzed in the subsonic, transonic, supersonic, and hypersonic conditions using the finite element method. Contrasting the strength and stiffness characteristics, and estimating the structure weight, it demonstrated that the parallel multi-web wing had better performance than the equal percentage multi-web wing in terms of mechanical characteristic and weight. Then, based on the parameterized parallel multi-web wing, the thicknesses of webs, skins, and ribs were optimized to reduce the structure weight.