Optimal Design of Unmanned Air Vehicles and Helicopter RotorsΒΆ
Discovery Room, E163 Student Union
Optimization methods are used for the preliminary design of a fixed-wing medium-altitude long range unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). A multi-objective evolutionary optimization approach is used, and the full Pareto front for endurance and weight as objectives is identified. A Kriging metamodel is used to accelerate the optimization process. Airfoil design for the UAV wing and preliminary structural design is performed. Several Pareto optimal designs are identified and evaluated. Aeroelastic optimization is performed for a composite helicopter rotor in forward flight. A two-level optimization approach is used along with response surfaces and genetic algorithms to address computational efficiency and discrete design variables. The importance of composite material uncertainty in aeroelastic analysis is identified, and a robust design optimization is performed. Lastly, orthogonal array based response surfaces are demonstrated for multi-objective reduction of vibration and flap power for a helicopter with dual active trailing edge flaps.
Biodata
Following his PhD at the University of Maryland in 1994, Dr. Ganguli worked at the GE Research Lab in Schenectady, New York, and at Pratt and Whitney, East Hartford, Connecticut. He joined the Aerospace Engineering Department of the Indian Institute of Science as a faculty in 2000 and currently holds the prestigious Satish Dhawan Chair Professorship. He has held visiting positions at TU Braunschweig, University of Ulm and Max Planck Institute of Metal Research, Stuttgart, in Germany; University Paul Sabatier and Institute of Mathematics, in Toulouse, France; Konkuk University in South Korea, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in USA, and the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Dr. Ganguli is the author of 5 text books, 170 peer reviewed journal papers and more than 150 conference papers.