A fidelity-fusion approach to the environmentally driven design of novel aircraft configurations

For the projected increases in global air travel to be sustainable future aircraft must offer significant improvements in environmental performance. The tubeand- wings design that has dominated for 60 years cannot service this need: novel approaches are required. In those years great strides that have been made in engineering analysis; the same cannot be said for design synthesis. Transformative methods are required to effectively harness analysis codes, seamlessly combining wide-ranging design space search with state-of-the-art design refinement. A key enabler for this is the development of multi-fidelity methods. Existing techniques are often limited by the tacit assumption that one (typically the most complex) fidelity represents "truth", with a variety of methods then employed to enable simpler and computationally cheaper codes to mimic that truth, hence facilitating the speed-up necessary for practical design work. This project, building on proven multi-fidelity methods developed in CUED, will aim to blend tools in a fidelity-fusion approach, allowing each to fully play to its strengths. This discipline-blind technique should provide at least an order of magnitude speed-up of the design process, rendering tightly coupled multidisciplinary designs practically accessible to high-fidelity analysis. The potential applications of such a technique are wide ranging; the principal test case here will be the environmentally driven design of novel future aircraft configurations.