3421. Structural Sizing or Weight Estimation in Preliminary Aircraft Design
$20.00
SAWE Members get a $200 store credit each year.*
*Store credit coupon available at checkout, click the button in your shopping cart to apply the coupon.
Not applicable to SAWE textbooks and current conference technical papers.
Paper
Abstract
At early stages of aircraft development, accurate weight estimation of primary structure is of great importance. Fast creation of meaningful finite element models is crucial to preliminary design activities in order to assess many configurations and different structural concepts for the aircraft?s airframe. The paper discusses several aspects concerning the development of structural sizing software for this purpose. Legacy software often suffers from being difficult to maintain and extend. The paper presents ideas how to address this problem. The software in development is based on a component-based architecture that strongly reduces unnecessary coupling of independent concepts and makes components reusable in other related software contexts.
