ENHANCING A MULTI-DISCIPLINARY OPTIMISATION FRAMEWORK WITH VIBRO-ACOUSTICS SOLUTIONS

The vibro-acoustic response of structural systems is critical to the aviation industry due to its implications on comfort and fatigue life. In the development of designs that allow the vibro-acoustic excitation of structural systems to be minimized, multiple disciplines should be considered in order to comply with stringent aircraft requirements, such as those implying structural integrity and performance. In this work, we enhance the modular OpenMDAO multi-disciplinary design framework with vibro-acoustic solutions, in that a vibro-acoustic Finite Element (FE) solver is embedded in the optimisation framework. The framework is first benchmarked by performing a topology optimisation of the noise radiation from a plate. Then, the vibro-acoustic response of aircraft fuselage panels to tonal propeller noise is performed as case study for the optimisation framework. In the former test case, it shown that a gradient-free approach is overperforming previous solutions based on the particle swarm algorithm. In the latter, it is shown that the pareto front is non-convex. The distance to the utopian point is used then to choose the best design solution.