Optimization methods for advanced design of aircraft panels: a comparison

Abstract

Advanced nonlinear analyses developed for estimating structural responses for recent applications for the aerospace industry lead to expensive computational times. However optimization procedures are necessary to quickly provide optimal designs. Several possible optimization methods are available in the literature, based on either local or global approximations, which may or may not include sensitivities (gradient computations), and which may or may not be able to resort to parallelism facilities. In this paper Sequential Convex Programming (SCP), Derivative Free Optimization techniques (DFO), Surrogate Based Optimization (SBO) and Genetic Algorithm (GA) approaches are compared in the design of stiffened aircraft panels with respect to local and global instabilities (buckling and collapse). The computations are carried out with software developed for the European aeronautical industry. The specificities of each optimization method, the results obtained, computational time considerations and their adequacy to the studied problems are discussed.

Optimization of composite structures with curved fiber trajectories

“…The optimization is carried out using the optimizers available in the BOSS Quattro optimization tool box [16]. Gradient based optimization [17] will be used for this application. The required sensitivities can be computed using finite difference since due to the small number of design variable it does not lead to a prohibitive computational overhead.…”

“…The performance of a gradient-based method, an adaptive surrogate approach and a genetic algorithm, is compared. Details of these optimizers are available in [17]. The default values of the optimizers were used [16].…”

Application of a bi-level scheme including topology optimization to the design of an aircraft pylon

“…The bi-level optimization problem is defined in the BOSS Quattro environment (Radovcic and Remouchamps, 2002), as illustrated in Figure 17. For the global optimization process acting on the global geometric design variables, a surrogate based method is used (Colson et al, 2010). A data base is constructed based on the values of the computed drag and on the structural weight obtained with topology optimization.…”

“…The reader will appreciate that for confidentiality reasons, these more realistic results are not revealed here. In the surrogate-based method method (Colson et al, 2010), a response surface relying on neural networks is first determined, based on a set of available (computed) function values. The optimization is then carried out on these approximated functions, with a genetic algorithm.…”

Numerical Optimization applied to structure sizing at AIRBUS: A multi-step process

“…The described sizing process does not come from a single attempt at the problem, rather the process should be seen as a result of a multi-year effort in structural optimization [1][2][3][4][5][6]. For this reason it is important to first describe the history of structural optimization at AIRBUS, and show the development of ideas, which has lead to today's vision.…”