Conceptual Design And Aerodynamic Optimization For UAV Family With Canard Configuration

Due to the development of economy and the need of national defence, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with high altitude and long endurance (HALE) has become more and more important. The large territory of our country demands variety of UAVs. The strategy of aircraft family can meet this demand. The far-coupled canard configuration is one of most suitable configurations for improvement of the aerodynamic characteristics of HALE UAV. This thesis studies the conceptual design and the aerodynamic optimization for HALE UAV family with canard configuration.An EXCEL program, which is used for calculation and optimization of aircraft primary parameters, is introduced. To enhance the optimization ability of the EXCEL program, an optimization software iSIGHT is used in the EXCEL program. To obtain the three-dimensional configuration sketch of HALE UAVs automatically, a CAD software CATIA is integrated into the EXCEL program. On the basis of the efforts above, a visual conceptual design and optimization system is developed. Then, the EXCEL program is applied to the conceptual design of HALE UAV successfully.A two-level aerodynamic optimization method based on surrogate models is proposed for the aerodynamic optimization of HALE UAV Family. The concept of this method originated from the combination of two-level optimization strategy in multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) and surrogate models. The surrogate models are used to reduce computing expense. This method is applied to an aerodynamic optimization of HALE UAV family. The results show that two-level aerodynamic optimization method based on surrogate models can find much better solution, compared to one by traditional aerodynamic optimization.To obtain more detail results of aerodynamic characteristics for the optimized configuration, a better fidelity aerodynamic program MGAERO is utilized. And a visualization software OMNI3D is used to display the computing results.