Development of approximations for HSCT wing bending material weight using response surface methodology

A procedure for generating a customized weight function for wing bending material weight of the High Speed Civil Transport (HSCT) is described. The weight function is based on the HSCT configuration parameters. A response surface methodology is used to fit a quadratic polynomial to data gathered from a large number of structural optimizations, a coarse-grained parallelization of structural optimization procedure is implemented by a master-slave processor arrangement on an Intel Paragon computer. The results of the structural optimization are noisy. Noise reduction in the structural optimization results is discussed. It is shown that the response surface filters out this noise. Statistical design of experiments technique is used to minimize the number of required structural optimizations and to maintain accuracy. Simple analysis techniques are used to find regions of the design space where the reasonable HSCT designs could occur, thus customizing the weight function to the design requirements of the HSCT, while the response surface itself is created employing detailed analysis methods. Analysis of variance is used to reduce the number of polynomial terms in the response surface model function. The linear and constant corrections are employed to improve the accuracy of the response surface model. Corrections are based on small number of high fidelity results. Configuration optimization of the HSCT employing customized weight function is compared to the configuration optimization of the HSCT with a general weight function.