Unified Development Study from Conceptual to Detailed Structural Design for Urban Air Mobility

Throughout the design process of an aircraft, structural models are built at different levels of the system. In early phases, coarse representations of the full vehicle structure are used for initial sizing activities while refined models of sub-systems are built in later phases for detailed sizing. Load data is typically generated at full vehicle level and must be accurately transferred and applied to detailed models of sub-systems. Often it is challenging to synchronize all models involved in the process with the latest design data since the models are built in a disconnected manner. To address these challenges, we propose a unified workflow in this paper that connects structural models at different system levels and enables seamless load transfer while ensuring associativity with parametric design data. In the development of electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) vehicles for Urban Air Mobility, lightweight design is of particular importance to compensate for the additional weight that is brought into the vehicle through batteries. Therefore, the unified workflow proposed in this paper is demonstrated in the context of Urban Air Mobility. We show how a conceptual model of a full eVTOL vehicle and a detailed model of its wing are built and associated with a parametric design model. The focus is then on detailed sizing of the wing structure driven by load data from the full vehicle model. A design exploration study for the wing structure aiming at meeting requirements in terms of skin buckling is performed and the best alternative is validated through a detailed post-buckling simulation.