Advanced Optimization Framework of a Tiltwing eVTOL Aircraft including Geometry Consideration

A multidisciplinary analysis framework focused on the tiltwing type eVTOL vehicle is proposed. A brief comparison between three, winged reference vehicles is performed first. It is briefly concluded that the tiltwing one is to be further investigated. The proposed framework incorporates multiple rotorcraft analyses including DATCOM, VSPAERO, CAMRAD II and NDARC. It is to capture the component characteristics and their inter-related effects in a multidisciplinary environment. By utilizing the framework, design space of the geometric variables that are rarely considered in the automated design procedure, such as the fuselage shape and wing location, is to be explored. Also, multi-layer perceptron neural network (MLP-NN) and parallel computing are utilized to accelerate time expensive analysis, which allows manual iteration to be replaced with an automated subprocess. Finally, several optimization approaches for minimizing an empty weight are attempted. A simple and rapid acoustic module is additionally included to analyze the tonal noise level of the final design, which shows possibility to be used in an iterative design procedure in the future.