Towards industrial aero-structural aircraft optimization via coupled-adjoint derivatives

The paper provides an overview of the maturity achieved on multi-disciplinary aero-elastic and aero-structural adjoint solvers developed during the European project MADELEINE. The main focus is on relevant industrial test cases specified by Airbus based on the XRF-1 research model, representative of a large passenger aircraft. First a cross-validation of the computed sensitivities among project partners is presented for both rigid and flexible shape gradients, based on a shared wing shape parametrization prescribed by the aircraft manufacturer. Then studies are performed by considering an increased number of parameters representative of industrial design applications. The benefit of taking flexibility into account is demonstrated by comparing single and multi-point optimization results. Finally an outlook of ongoing aero-structural optimizations exploiting an integrated multi-disciplinary feasible strategy is provided.