Robustness Analysis of an Aircraft Design for Short Takeoff and Landing

As part of the Collaborative Research Center 880, preliminary aircraft design activities are carried out for a new class of low-noise cruise-efficient short takeoff and landing (CESTOL) transport aircraft. A corresponding aircraft is quite different from a state-of-the-art commercial aircraft because of the use of a high-lift system with active flow control. The fact that new technologies are not sufficiently understood yet in combination with the assumption of common design data and the use of classical calculation methods expresses itself in uncertainties that are of epistemic character. The robustness of a deterministic CESTOL aircraft design toward parameters such as the necessary engine thrust, direct operating costs, and the maximum takeoff and landing distances is investigated here concerning the mentioned uncertainties. For this purpose, a stochastic description of parameter variations of the design is formulated. Stochastic quantities are computed by Monte Carlo sampling to rate the robustness. A distributed component-based software implementation is used to perform the Monte Carlo sampling. The software system is installed on a Linux cluster with several multi-CPU computers; a deterministic sample is simulated through the design program PrADO.