Air Vehicle Enviroment in C++: A Computational Design Environment for Conceptual Innovations

Aerospacetechnologyplannersintheairforceresearchlaboratoryareactivelydeveloping processes that produce a priority order for corporate investments. Technology assessment is one such process. Aerospace technology can be evaluated in the context of computationally intensive designs of innovative vehicle concepts. Computational design optimization traces technology performance metrics to system level design objectives and constraints. The air vehicle environment in C++ will support this process in the form of a pilot code currently underdevelopment.DesigninnovatorswillbenefitfromairvehicleenvironmentinC++atone of three levels. These three levels benefit a) the end user through interactive operations and file input/output, b) the object-oriented programmer through a compiled library of properly documented and inheritable objects, and c) the air vehicle environment in C++ developer who wishes to enhance air vehicle environment in C++ capability with modifications to the source code. The pilot environment described here focuses on parent‐child relationships, automated dependency management, geometry, meshing, analysis, and eventually gradientbased optimization. All together, the overall capability leads to design variant management that will populate a database for either surrogate (response surface) modeling or high-level Pareto optimization. The proposed test case targets a suite of high-altitude-long-endurance aeroelastic concepts with geometric nonlinearity and follower forces.