Optimal Design of Expendable Launch Vehicles using Stage-Wise MDO Formulation
Mathieu Balesdent, Nicolas Bérend, Philippe Dépincé · 13th AIAA/ISSMO Multidisciplinary Analysis Optimization Conference · 2010
Optimal design of launch vehicles is a complex process which gathers a series of disciplines. The classical method used to solve such problems consists in decomposing the problem into the dierent disciplines and in associating a global optimizer and disciplinary analyzers (MultiDiscipline Feasible method - most used in launch vehicle design). This paper a presents a new MDO method based on a transversal decomposition of the design process which is more appropriate to the multistage launch vehicle architecture. The proposed bi-level method splits up the optimization process into the dierent stages and performs concurrent optimizations of the stages. Three formulations of this method are proposed and are compared to MDF for the optimization of a liquid fueled multistage launch vehicle. The main advantages of the proposed method are to reduce the dimension of the search domain and the number of constraints at system-level, and to work well from random initializations.