Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO)

A "classical’ Concorde-hke design w ill be required to reach technology limits of all relevant dis­ciplines This requires perfect harmonization of all aspects in the design.

An unconventional configuration can improve performance over the limits of the "clas­sical’’ configuration. But it requires a new kind of cooperation between the individual disci­plines. with dissimilar interfaces between the disciplines compared to the "classical" approach.

In both cases, a solution will only be reached by using the tools of Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) which is treated in more detail in several lectures of this course. There arc three objectives of MDO. each of them of equal importance.

Harmonize multiple disciplines:

Organize cooperation and data transfer among all relevant disciplines.

Although all over the world companies talk about introducing MDO. total quality management (TQM), concurrent engineering (CE) etc., in real life there are strong ob­jections of hierarchies against any kind of cooperation between departments. The fu­ture will show if market competition will improve the situation.

Cooperative design:

Data to be respected for harmonization have to be carefully selected and must be ordered from crude prcdcsign to detailed final design. Data transfer from pre design to the more detailed design steps and vice versa must be organized and fit into the data selected for interdisciplinary transfer.

Combine the relevant data into a design which must be evaluated by all participating dis­ciplines

The design process must be able to update the design exploiting the data corrections oc­curring in the cooperative evaluation.

Optimization:

Use optimization tools which are well adapted to the different design stages in order to

exploit the best combination of the available technologies. Especially for interdisciplinary work, numerical optimisation is recommended.

MDO is the key technology for a new supersonic transport. For subsonic transports remarkable improvements arc also expected