Scaling of Hybrid Wing-Body-Type Aircraft: Exploration Through High-Fidelity Aerodynamic Shape Optimization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Unconventional aircraft configurations have the potential to reduce aviationâ s contribution to climate change through substantial reductions in fuel burn. One promising configuration which has received much attention is the hybrid wing-body (HWB). Due to the lack of design experience for unconventional configurations, high-fidelity design and optimization methods will be critical in their development. \nThis thesis presents the application of a gradient-based aerodynamic shape optimization algorithm based on the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations to the aerodynamic design of conventional tube-and-wing (CTW) and HWB aircraft. The optimal aerodynamic shapes and performance for a range of aircraft sizes including regional, narrow-body, midsize, and wide-body classes are found so as to characterize the aerodynamic efficiency benefits of the HWB configuration with respect to equivalent CTW designs. Trim-constrained drag minimization is performed at cruise, with a large design space of over 400 design variables. The smaller optimized HWBs, including the regional and narrow-body classes, while more aerodynamically efficient, burn at least as much fuel as to the equivalently optimized CTWs due to their increased weight, while the larger wide-body-class HWB has almost 11% lower cruise fuel burn. \nTo investigate alternative configurations which may yield improved efficiency, exploratory optimizations with significant geometric freedom are then performed, resulting in a set of novel shapes with a more slender lifting fuselage and distinct wings. Based on these exploratory results, new lifting-fuselage configurations (LFCs) are designed. The slenderness of the LFC fuselage decreases with aircraft size, such that, for the largest class, the LFC reverts to a classical HWB shape. This new configuration offers higher aerodynamic efficiency than the HWBs, with the smaller classes seeing the largest benefit from the new configuration. This new lifting-fuselage concept offers 6% lower cruise fuel burn than the CTW in the regional class, and a marginal benefit in the narrow-body class. The effects of cruise altitude, stability requirements, and weight sensitivity are also examined.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".