Multidisciplinary Optimization Approach to the Conceptual Design of Hydrogen-Electric Aircraft

This study presents the application of a Multidisciplinary Design and Optimization (MDO) approach to the conceptual design of a hydrogen-electric aircraft. The primary objective is to investigate the benefits of optimizing the wing planform and additional design parameters by maximizing the Payload-Range Energy Efficiency (PREE). Five disciplines are integrated into the MDO process and suitably modeled to balance computational time and model accuracy. Here, three different MDO architectures are proposed to study the effect of managing the disciplines interaction in various ways. Depending on the scheme, the results show a great impact on most of the key design variables, with a significant effect on the MTOM increment. Conversely, when minimizing MTOM, aquasi-inverse trend is observed, revealing a consistent reduction in PREE. To conclude, a sensitivity analysis comparing the results with the effect of a single parameter variation is addressed. This underscores the critical importance of considering disciplinary coupling from the early stages of aircraft design to reduce consistency errors and shorten the overall design process.