Efficient parametrization of generic aircraft geometry

Abstract

A new method is presented for the parametrization of aircraft geometry; it is efficient in the sense that a relatively small number of parameters are required to describe a complex surface geometry. The method views surface generation as a boundary-value problem and produces surfaces as the solutions to elliptic partial differential equations, hence its name, the PDE method. The use of the PDE method will be illustrated in this article by the parametrization of double delta geometries; it will be shown that it is possible to capture the basic features of the large-scale geometry of the aircraft in terms of a small set of design variables.