A hybrid multilevel approach for aeroelastic optimization of composite wing-box

The main problem in a multidisciplinary aircraft design is usually the development of an efficient method to integrate structures or structural properties, which can be considered both as “global” and “local” design variables. This paper describes an integrated aerodynamic / dynamic / structural optimization proce-dure for a composite wing-box design. The procedure combines an aeroelastic optimization of a composite wing based on a general purpose optimizer such as the Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) and a com- posite optimization using Genetic Algorithm (GA). Both the optimizations are implemented through a hy- brid multilevel decomposition technique.