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Descripción
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| Unmanned aircraft and, particularly, RPAS (Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems) are nowadays experiencing great growth both in the military and civil industries. This is due to the fact that removing the need to be manned has enabled the improvement of their endurance, range, and overall performance while, at the same time, reducing the risk to which human lives were exposed. In addition, RPAS can be made much smaller. This decrease of mass and size increases the variety of missions they can perform. However, the design process to manufacture such aircraft is often long and costly, which prevents small companies from undertaking it. Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) is an engineering field whose focus is to solve highly complex problems by the means of optimization techniques. It has been used in the design of commercial aircraft for a long time, but integrating the various engineering disciplines that take part in designing an RPAS within an MDO to simplify the design process is a challenge. In addition, there is an ample variety of architectures for MDO projects and, the reasons to choose a particular one, have to be discussed on a case by case basis. During the last years, distributed architectures have become widespread, given that they can take advantage of parallel computing (even with graphical platforms) and reduce computing time. Adapting the formulation of a problem to a particular architecture is a slow and ponderous task that, in many cases, must be repeated several times to find out which is the architecture that provides the best results. Therefore, a new architecture has been developed: GPPA (Generic Parameter Penalty Architecture), which is able to behave like a number of different architectures by modifying three parameters. Usage of MDO techniques in aerospace engineering is not new. These techniques have been applied to numerous and somehow complicated aeronautical problems, but never before as the sole element in charge of the preliminary design of a full RPAS, including multiple subdisciplines and the ability to contemplate unconstrained aerodynamic configurations. That is the reason why a new MDO methodology for the quick, efficient, and robust design of RPAS has been developed. This methodology takes into account the various subdisciplines of aeronautical design, such as aerodynamics, structural calculus, propulsion, economy, etc. It provides the environment to generate, from the RPAS? objective performance, a design that is suitable for the flight conditions of the aircraft and its mission. It also generates the RPAS? geometry, structure, and position of all its elements to establish the foundations from which more precise (and slow) methods such as FEM/VEM can further evolve the design. | |
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Internacional
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ISBN
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Tipo de Tesis
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Doctoral |
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Calificación
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Aprobado |
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Fecha
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15/06/2018 |