Aircraft Design Optimization on a Personal Computer

A PC-based program module was developed to simultaneously optimize an aircraft for thrust-to-weight ratio, wing loading, aspect ratio, sweep, taper ratio, and thickness ratio, in the presence of performance constraints, to a selected weight or cost measure-of-merit. A simple yet robust optimization scheme was employed, relying on the ever-increasing power of personal computers to permit exhaustive searching by a simple gradient method rather than using some more-sophisticated but more complex and perhaps less-robust optimization strategy. Results indicate the program works, within the limitations of the classical analysis methods used.