Design Optimization of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Design Optimization of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Author: Athanasios Papageorgiou

Publisher: Linköping University Electronic Press

Published: 2019-11-13

Total Pages: 99

ISBN-13: 917519001X

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Over the last years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have gradually become a more efficient alternative to manned aircraft, and at present, they are being deployed in a broad spectrum of both military as well as civilian missions. This has led to an unprecedented market expansion with new challenges for the aeronautical industry, and as a result, it has created a need to implement the latest design tools in order to achieve faster idea-to-market times and higher product performance. As a complex engineering product, UAVs are comprised of numerous sub-systems with intricate synergies and hidden dependencies. To this end, Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) is a method that can identify systems with better performance through the concurrent consideration of several engineering disciplines under a common framework. Nevertheless, there are still many limitations in MDO, and to this date, some of the most critical gaps can be found in the disciplinary modeling, in the analysis capabilities, and in the organizational integration of the method. As an aeronautical product, UAVs are also expected to work together with other systems and to perform in various operating environments. In this respect, System of Systems (SoS) models enable the exploration of design interactions in various missions, and hence, they allow decision makers to identify capabilities that are beyond those of each individual system. As expected, this significantly more complex formulation raises new challenges regarding the decomposition of the problem, while at the same time, it sets further requirements in terms of analyses and mission simulation. In this light, this thesis focuses on the design optimization of UAVs by enhancing the current MDO capabilities and by exploring the use of SoS models. Two literature reviews serve as the basis for identifying the gaps and trends in the field, and in turn, five case studies try to address them by proposing a set of expansions. On the whole, the problem is approached from a technical as well as an organizational point of view, and thus, this research aims to propose solutions that can lead to better performance and that are also meaningful to the Product Development Process (PDP). Having established the above foundation, this work delves firstly into MDO, and more specifically, it presents a framework that has been enhanced with further system models and analysis capabilities, efficient computing solutions, and data visualization tools. At a secondary level, this work addresses the topic of SoS, and in particular, it presents a multi-level decomposition strategy, multi-fidelity disciplinary models, and a mission simulation module. Overall, this thesis presents quantitative data which aim to illustrate the benefits of design optimization on the performance of UAVs, and it concludes with a qualitative assessment of the effects that the proposed methods and tools can have on both the PDP and the organization.

Adaptive Computing in Design and Manufacture VI
Adaptive Computing in Design and Manufacture VI

Author: I.C. Parmee

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2011-06-27

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0857293389

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The Adaptive Computing in Design and Manufacture conference series has become a well-established, largely application-oriented meeting recognised by several UK Engineering Institutions and the International Society of Genetic and Evolutionary Computing. The main theme of the series relates to the integration of evolutionary and adaptive computing technologies with design and manufacturing processes whilst also taking into account complementary advanced computing technologies. Evolutionary and adaptive computing techniques continue to increase their penetration of industrial and commercial practice as awareness of their powerful search, exploration and optimisation capabilities becomes ever more prevalent, and increasing desk-top computational capability renders stochastic population-based search a far more viable proposition. There has been a significant increase in the development and integration of commercial software tools utilising adaptive computing technologies and the emergence of related commercial research and consultancy organisations supporting the introduction of best practice in terms of industrial utilisation. The book is comprised of selected papers that cover a diverse set of industrial application areas including engineering design and design environments and manufacturing process design, scheduling and control. Various aspects of search, exploration and optimisation are investigated in the context of integration with industrial processes including multi-objective and constraint satisfaction, development and utilization of meta-models, algorithm and strategy development and human-centric evolutionary approaches. The role of agent-based and neural net technologies in terms of supporting search processes and providing an alternative simulation environment is also explored. This collection of papers will be of particular interest to both industrial researchers and practitioners in addition to the academic research communities across engineering, operational research and computer science.

Unmanned Aircraft Design
Unmanned Aircraft Design

Author: Mohammad Sadraey

Publisher: Morgan & Claypool Publishers

Published: 2017-09-19

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1681732033

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This book provides fundamental principles, design procedures, and design tools for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with three sections focusing on vehicle design, autopilot design, and ground system design. The design of manned aircraft and the design of UAVs have some similarities and some differences. They include the design process, constraints (e.g., g-load, pressurization), and UAV main components (autopilot, ground station, communication, sensors, and payload). A UAV designer must be aware of the latest UAV developments; current technologies; know lessons learned from past failures; and they should appreciate the breadth of UAV design options. The contribution of unmanned aircraft continues to expand every day and over 20 countries are developing and employing UAVs for both military and scientific purposes. A UAV system is much more than a reusable air vehicle or vehicles. UAVs are air vehicles, they fly like airplanes and operate in an airplane environment. They are designed like air vehicles; they have to meet flight critical air vehicle requirements. A designer needs to know how to integrate complex, multi-disciplinary systems, and to understand the environment, the requirements and the design challenges and this book is an excellent overview of the fundamentals from an engineering perspective. This book is meant to meet the needs of newcomers into the world of UAVs. The materials are intended to provide enough information in each area and illustrate how they all play together to support the design of a complete UAV. Therefore, this book can be used both as a reference for engineers entering the field or as a supplementary text for a UAV design course to provide system-level context for each specialized topic.

On Subscale Flight Testing
On Subscale Flight Testing

Author: Alejandro Sobron

Publisher: Linköping University Electronic Press

Published: 2018-11-05

Total Pages: 130

ISBN-13: 9176852202

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Downscaled physical models, also referred to as subscale models, have played an essential role in the investigation of the complex physics of flight until the recent disruption of numerical simulation. Despite the fact that improvements in computational methods are slowly pushing experimental techniques towards a secondary role as verification or calibration tools, real-world testing of physical prototypes still provides an unmatched confidence. Physical models are very effective at revealing issues that are sometimes not correctly identified in the virtual domain, and hence can be a valuable complement to other design tools. But traditional wind-tunnel testing cannot always meet all of the requirements of modern aeronautical research and development. It is nowadays too expensive to use these scarce facilities to explore different design iterations during the initial stages of aircraft development, or to experiment with new and immature technologies. Testing of free-flight subscale models, referred to as Subscale Flight Testing (SFT), could offer an affordable and low-risk alternative for complementing conventional techniques with both qualitative and quantitative information. The miniaturisation of mechatronic systems, the advances in rapid-prototyping techniques and power storage, as well as new manufacturing methods, currently enable the development of sophisticated test objects at scales that were impractical some decades ago. Moreover, the recent boom in the commercial drone industry has driven a quick development of specialised electronics and sensors, which offer nowadays surprising capabilities at competitive prices. These recent technological disruptions have significantly altered the cost-benefit function of SFT and it is necessary to re-evaluate its potential in the contemporary aircraft development context. This thesis aims to increase the comprehension and knowledge of the SFT method in order to define a practical framework for its use in aircraft design; focusing on low-cost, short-time solutions that don’t require more than a small organization and few resources. This objective is approached from a theoretical point of view by means of an analysis of the physical and practical limitations of the scaling laws; and from an empirical point of view by means of field experiments aimed at identifying practical needs for equipment, methods, and tools. A low-cost data acquisition system is developed and tested; a novel method for semi-automated flight testing in small airspaces is proposed; a set of tools for analysis and visualisation of flight data is presented; and it is also demonstrated that it is possible to explore and demonstrate new technology using SFT with a very limited amount of economic and human resources. All these, together with a theoretical review and contextualisation, contribute to increasing the comprehension and knowledge of the SFT method in general, and its potential applications in aircraft conceptual design in particular.