"The Dimensionality Challenge in Aerospace Design"

Speaker Bio: Mark Drela currently is the Terry J. Kohler Professor at the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He joined the faculty there in January 1986. His primary research interests are in low speed and transonic aerodynamics, design and performance of aircraft and aeromechanical devices, and computational aerodynamic design methods. He has developed a number of aerodynamic and aeromechanical design/analysis codes currently being used in the aircraft and gas turbine industries, and in academia. He teaches aircraft design fundamentals, external aerodynamics, and fluid mechanics of boundary layers at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He is also the director of the Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel.

Abstract: A major challenge in the design and development of new or even derived aerospace vehicles and systems is the enormous size of their combined design space and operational-parameter space, which is compounded by the introduction of new technologies such as cryogenic fuels, distributed electric propulsion, and advanced materials and manufacturing methods. The size of these design+operational spaces makes it infeasible to computationally characterize them solely by high-fidelity 3D RANS and 3D FEA methods, which are far too slow for the task even with the most modern computational resources. Conversely, low-fidelity methods are sufficiently fast, but typically lack the necessary physics and generality to reliably examine and evaluate novel vehicle concepts. The most effective overall approach is to employ appropriate mid-fidelity models which combine relative speed with just enough physics representation to enable an extensive exploration of the vehicle's design space.They thus enable early evolution of the design close to its best-possible configuration as set by physical limits, so that high-fidelity methods can then be most effectively employed to perform the final design refinement. Examples of this approach will be drawn from a few selected current development projects of novel and extreme-performance aircraft.