MULTIDISCIPLINARY DESIGN ANALYSIS AND OPTIMIZATION PROCESS DEDICATED TO BLENDED WING BODY CONFIGURATIONS

International audience ; The Blended Wing Body configuration offers very promising fuel consumption reduction and could represent a solution for the future of the aviation industry with regard to the reduction of its environmental footprint. To explore in depth the potential benefits of the Blended Wing Body configuration, ONERA-The French Aerospace Lab-develops since 2015 a dedicated multidisciplinary design analysis and optimization process. This process is composed of numerous disciplinary modules to take into account the broadest possible criteria or parameters that could affect the aircraft design towards a feasible and realistic final solution. The design and optimization of a long-range commercial transport mission aircraft with this process firstly confirm the good performance of the Blended Wing Body configuration and its credibility as a future existing solution and secondly highlight the improvement provided by the use of multidisciplinary approaches for bringing out optimal solutions in a constrained environment. The process has then been used in the frame of the European Clean Sky 2 (ITD Airframe) ONERA-DLR project NACOR (Call for Core Partners Wave 1) to design and optimize the SMILE Blended Wing Body configuration for a short/medium-range mission.