The idea of multidisciplinary optimization ( MDO ) has been introduced successfully into wide areas of engineering since the last years.
The aircraft industry, especially the preliminary design, was dominated by brilliant personalities up into the seventies. Proposed configurations were designed, built, tested, dropped or a success. This means, that the decision for building an aircraft series was made after successful flight testing.
But on one hand due to the pressure of the rising amount of work from more demanding standards which includes more people in the decision process and on the other hand due to more efficient aircraft design tools and performance prediction, the project “go-ahead” tends to go more into the early stages of the hitherto known process of defining civil transport aircraft. Tools like MDO or digital mock-up are the key ingredients for a future development process and better information, more variations, competition analysis and customer oriented design will lead to a long-term success on the market.
This presentation will discuss the application of the DA MDO aircraft design tool, the experience on the next generation supersonic aircraft project ( SCT ) and the development potential of such a tool.