Progress toward using sensitivity derivatives in a high-fidelity aeroelastic analysis of a supersonic transport

Several government/commercial off-the-shelf modular software packages have been combined to perform static aeroelastic analysis and aerodynamic optimization of a generic high-speed civil transport, with the eventual goal of performing high-fidelity multidisciplinary optimization (MDO). Results obtained for the aeroelastic analysis and aerodynamic optimization cases are consistent with expectations and serve as a benchmark for future results that will incorporate sensitivity derivatives from the computational fluids and structures solvers to reduce the wall-clock computational expense of high-fidelity MDO.