Modelling and Simulation: Novel design methods and tools for novel aircraft configurations

For example, the civil aerospace industry has for many years been perfecting the classical “tube and wing” aircraft configuration, which is now reaching the point of diminishing returns.  Therefore the synthesis and exploration of novel product and systems architectures necessitates the research, development and introduction of novel methods and tools to facilitate the requisite design processes. The two PhD topics are complementary, each covering an important aspect of the early (aircraft) design process: The first PhD will focus on systems architecting, in particular on methods and tools for rapid systems synthesis and analysis at pre-competitive and conceptual design stage.  The aim is to develop an interactive tool enabling the system architect to navigate seamlessly through the requirements, functional, logical and physical views of the evolving architecture. Associated challenges include the orchestration of multilevel physics-based models into a consistent and interactive (human-centric) multidisciplinary computational system, through a component-driven modularisation of the constituent disciplines, for example, (aerodynamic) loads, weights, performance and so forth. The second PhD will concentrate on Uncertainty, Risk and Robustness.  The challenge here is the quantification and management of higher levels of uncertainty and risk. Unlike incremental developments, novel product architectures are subject to a multitude of uncertainties, ranging from the more “traditional” aleatory sources such as environmental and product data variability to epistemic uncertainty (associated with lack of knowledge) such as technology maturity and experts’ grasp of the problem.