ADOPTION OF A DOE-BASED APPROACH FOR THE IMPLEMENTATION OF STRUCTURAL SURROGATE MODELS IN THE PRELIMINARY DESIGN OF A REGIONAL BOX-WING AIRCRAFT

One of the possible ways to face the challenge of reducing the environmental impact of aviation, without limiting the growth of air transport, is the introduction of more efficient, radically different aircraft architectures. Among these, the box-wing one represents a promising solution, which, according to the achievement of the H2020 project “PARSIFAL”, would bring to a 20% reduction in terms of emitted CO2 per passenger-kilometre. The present paper faces the problem of estimating the structural mass of a box-wing aircraft in the early stages of the design, focusing on a test case resulting from the application to the regional aircraft category. This is one of the objects of study of the Italian research project “PROSIB”, whose main goals are the preliminary design of hybrid-electric aircraft and the definition of associated design methodologies. In the first part of the paper the description of the structural surrogate models is reported, then their integration and main outcomes are detailed.