Modeling of Tunable Elastic Ultralight Aircraft

Cramer, Nicholas B ; Kim, Joseph H ; Gregg, Christine E ; Cheung, Kenneth C ; Swei, Sean S

关键词: ELASTIC PROPERTIES;    AEROSPACE ENGINEERING;    ULTRALIGHT AIRCRAFT;    HETEROGENEITY;    SIMULATION;    WEIGHT REDUCTION;   

RP-ID  :  ARC-E-DAA-TN68963

学科分类：航空航天科学

美国|英语

来源: NASA Technical Reports Server

【 摘 要 】

Aircraft weight is one of the most critical factors in the design and operation of modern vehicles. The ability to integrate ultra-light materials into the primary load bearing structures has the potential to reduce aircraft weight significantly. Ultralight materials tend to be lattice-based meta-materials that are difficult and computationally expensive to model. One of the advantages of meta-materials is to be able to tune or "program" their bulk material properties through the placement of heterogeneous components in the material. A large amount of time devoted to the simulation in the development time for the tuning of the material can be a barrier to the adoption of large scale lattice materials. In this paper, we present a workflow and analysis tool-set to provide first-order estimates for rapid development of engineered lattice materials for aerospace applications. We present results for estimating the displacement and maximum structural stresses.