Hypersonic vehicle co-design for multi-stage mission planning

Abstract

Optimization of a vehicle’s physical design and flight trajectory in the same procedure is a process commonly known as co-design. The co-design framework is particularly suited to hypersonic vehicle design, since it has the potential to greatly reduce the number of development cycle iterations. Recent progress has led to co-design in models of increasing complexity, with higher fidelity achieved in the vehicle parameterization, physical models used in the dynamical systems governing the underlying optimal control problem, as well as the surrogate functions used in estimation of the aerodynamic forces. However, these works have so far only considered vehicle designs optimized for a single par..