Developing customized weight function by structural optimization on parallel computers

Abstract

A procedure for generating a customized weight function for wing bending material weight of the High Speed Civil Transport (HSCT) is described. Response surface methodology is used to fit a quadratic polynomial to data gathered from a large number of structural optimizations. Coarsegrained parallelization of structural optimization is achieved by a master-slave processor arrangement on an Intel Paragon computer. Noisy behavior of the structural optimization results is discussed, and it is shown that the response surface filters out this noise. Several techniques are employed in order to minimize the number of required structural optimizations and to maintain accuracy. Simple analysis techniques are used to find regions of the design space where reasonable HSCT designs could occur, thus customizing the weight function to the design requirements of the HSCT. Intervening variables and analysis of variance are employed to reduce the number of polynomial terms in the response surface model function. Overall optimizations of the HSCT are compared to optimizations with a more general weight function.