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MDOlab Newsletter—Fall 2014 |
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Dear Friend, Welcome to the MDOlab newsletter, an update on research and open source software that we send a few times a year. You are receiving this because I think you are interested in numerical optimization, MDO, engineering design, or aircraft design. If this is not the case, feel free to unsubscribe. If you know someone who might like to subscribe, please forward them this newsletter. Best regards, |
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Wing aerodynamic shape optimization benchmark |
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The AIAA Aerodynamic Design Optimization Discussion Group developed a series of benchmark cases. In this paper, we solve the RANS-based wing optimization problem, try to find multiple local minima, and solve a number of related wing design optimization problems. The initial and optimized geometries and meshes are provided here.
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Aerodynamic design optimization of a blended-wing body aircraft |
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Satellite multidisciplinary design optimization benchmark |
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In collaboration with NASA and the Michigan Exploration Lab, we developed a new large-scale benchmark MDO problem, and solved a problem with 25,000 design variables and 2.2 million state variables by optimizing the data downloaded from a CubeSat subject to operational and physical constraints. This problem is now a plugin in the OpenMDAO open source project.
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Parallel structural finite-element analysis for design optimization |
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The Toolkit for Analysis of Composite Structures (TACS) was developed by Prof. Graeme Kennedy, and is the structural solver used in the MDOlab. Its main advantages are the parallel scalability and efficient gradient computation via a parallel adjoint method.
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pyOpt: A common Python interface for nonlinear optimizers |
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GeoMACH: A geometry engine for aircraft configurations |
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This is a geometry engine that enables the rapid generation of parametric aircraft outer mold lines and internal structures, which facilitates high-fidelity MDO. GeoMACH computes all the geometry derivatives, so it is well suited for use with gradient-based optimizers.
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OpenMDAO: A framework for multidisciplinary optimization |
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| This framework is being developed by NASA to facilitate the implementation of MDO problems. It also provides a number of built-in algorithms for the solution of such problems. The latest version provides an efficient method for computing coupled derivatives for gradient-based optimization. |
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Other recent publications |
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A survey of MDO architectures |
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There are a number of architectures available to solve multidisciplinary design optimization problems, but so far, they had not been explained in a consistent notation. This survey paper describes all known MDO architectures and provides flow diagrams for each architecture.
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High-fidelity aerostructural optimization of aircraft configurations |
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We have enabled design optimization of lifting surfaces with respect to hundreds of aerodynamic and structural design variables. The numerical methods used to achieve this are described in the first paper, and the second one applies these methods to the multipoint optimization of a transport aircraft.
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A review of methods for computing derivatives |
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This paper reviews all available methods for computing derivatives numerically (finite-differences, complex-step, adjoint method, and algorithmic differentiation), and unifies these methods using a single equation.
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