The GENUS aircraft conceptual design environment

Abstract

The design of aircraft has evolved over time from the classical design approach to the more modern computer based design method utilising multivariate design optimisation. In recent years aircraft concepts and configurations have become more diverse and complex thus pushing many synthesis packages beyond their capability. Furthermore, many examples of aircraft design software focus on the analysis of one particular concept thus requiring separate packages for each concept. This can lead to complications in comparing concepts and configurations as differences in performance may originate from different prediction toolsets being used. This paper presents the GENUS Aircraft Design Framework developed by Cranfield University's Aircraft Design Group to address these issues. The paper reviews available aircraft design methodologies and describes the challenges faced in their development and application. Following this, the GENUS aircraft design environment is introduced, along with the theoretical background and practical reasoning behind the program architecture. Particular attention is given to the programming, choice of methodology and optimization techniques involved. Subsequently, some applications of the developed methodology, implemented in the framework are presented to illustrate the diversity of the approach. Three special classes of aircraft design concept are presented briefly.

Blended Wing Body with Boundary layer Ingestion Conceptual Design in a Multidisciplinary Design Analysis Optimization Environment

“…To overcome this issue, a multidisciplinary design analysis and optimization (MDAO) environment was developed in Cranfield University's Aircraft Design Group [2]. The GENUS aircraft design environment has been applied to a hypersonic space design [3], a solar UAV design, and supersonic business jet design [4].…”

“…The MDAO aircraft design environment is called GENUS [2], which has been developed by Aircraft Design Group at Cranfield University since 2012. It is a comprehensive tool for computational design that allows reuse of the design process and integrates the different disciplinary models in a modular, scalable, flexible and independent arrangement.…”

“…The geometry parts are abstracted into lifting surface array and body component array, which provides great flexibility for designers [2]. The lifting surface array is then specified as wing, horizontal tail, vertical tail or canard.…”

Low-boom low-drag solutions through the evaluation of different supersonic business jet concepts

“…In this research, we select four business-class concepts the Aerion AS-2, the Spike S-512, the HyperMach SonicStar, and the Cranfield University E-5 SSBJ, plus the BOOM airliner and the NASA X-59 QueSST, to evaluate their sonic boom and aerodynamic performance. The research is conducted in a multidisciplinary design analysis optimisation (MDAO) environment called GENUS (18) . In the previous studies, the authors have established the multidisciplinary methodologies for supersonic transport (19) , evaluated the sonic boom and aerodynamics of three different classes supersonic transport (20,21) , and optimised a baseline configuration for low-boom and low-drag objectives (21) .…”

Sonic Boom and Drag Evaluation of Supersonic Jet Concepts

“…There are also some supersonic business jet (SSBJ) concepts proposed by several commercial companies, the BOOM airliner, Spike S-512, HyperMach SonicStar, Aerion AS-2, SAI QSST-X, and so on. This paper evaluates three different classes of supersonic airliners (Concorde, Cranfield E-5 SSBJ, and NASA QueSST X-plane) with the aerodynamic analysis and sonic boom prediction methods developed in a multidisciplinary design analysis optimization (MDAO) environment called GENUS [3,4].…”