Automated Generation of Aircraft Wing Structures

This paper describes the development of a software tool used to automate the preliminary design of aircraft wing structure. By taking wing planform and aircraft weight as inputs, the tool is able to predict loads that will be experienced by the wing. An iterative process is then used to select optimal material thicknesses for each section of the design to minimize total structural weight. The load analysis checks for tensile failure as well as Euler buckling when considering if a given wing structure is valid. After running a variety of test cases with the tool it was found that wing structure of small-scale aircraft is predominantly buckling driven. This is problematic because commonly used weight estimation equations are based on large scale aircraft with strength driven wing designs. Thus, if these equations are applied to smaller aircraft, resulting weight estimates are often much lower than reality. The use of a physics-based approach to preliminary sizing could greatly improve the accuracy of weight predictions and accelerate the design process.