Reliability-based aeroelastic optimization of a composite aircraft wing via fluid-structure interaction of high fidelity solvers

We consider reliability based aeroelastic optimization of a AGARD 445.6 composite aircraft wing with stochastic parameters. Both commercial engineering software and an in-house reliability analysis code are employed in this high-fidelity computational framework. Finite volume based flow solver Fluent is used to solve 3D Euler equations, while Gambit is the fluid domain mesh generator and Catia-V5-R16 is used as a parametric 3D solid modeler. Abaqus, a structural finite element solver, is used to compute the structural response of the aeroelastic system. Mesh based parallel code coupling interface MPCCI-3.0.6 is used to exchange the pressure and displacement information between Fluent and Abaqus to perform a loosely coupled fluid-structure interaction by employing a staggered algorithm. To compute the probability of failure for the probabilistic constraints, one of the well known MPP (Most Probable Point) based reliability analysis methods, FORM (First Order Reliability Method) is implemented in Matlab. This in-house developed Matlab code is embedded in the multidisciplinary optimization workflow which is driven by Modefrontier. Modefrontier 4.1, is used for its gradient based optimization algorithm called NBI-NLPQLP which is based on sequential quadratic programming method. A pareto optimal solution for the stochastic aeroelastic optimization is obtained for a specified reliability index and results are compared with the results of deterministic aeroelastic optimization.