Tailoring of a Composite Regional Jet Wing Using the Slice and Swap Method

This paper presents an aeroelastic tailoring procedure used to design wing structures to meet strength, buckling, and flutter requirements simultaneously. The optimization process is divided into a continuous optimization step using lamination parameters, and a discrete optimization step, which produces detailed blended stacking sequences satisfying complex design and manufacturing guidelines. The implementation of the continuous optimization step benefits from recent advances in lamination parameter constraints, allowing for close approximation of realistic directional stiffness requirements. In the final discrete optimization step, a novel and efficient parametrization scheme called the Slice and Swap Method is developed. The scheme provides a design space that is simple to implement, allows for an ample family of blended stacking sequences to be explored, and includes a number of design requirements satisfied by suitable encoding. The efficiency of the aeroelastic tailoring procedure is demonstrated via a sample application to a realistic industry-scale regional jet wing.