22nd Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, Harrogate, UK, 28 August - 1st September, 2000
Paper ICAS 2000-7.4.1

AN INTEGRATED OPTIMIZATION FOR CONCEPTUAL DESIGNS OF SPACEPLANE

T. Tsuchiya
School of Engineering, the University of Tokyo, Japan

Keywords: guidance and control, optimization technique, spaceplane

This paper presents a new parallel optimization method to solve large-scale design and control optimization problems and its applications to conceptual design of spaceplane. Generally, it takes much computing load and time to solve a large-scale optimization problem. Therefore, the new method divides the problem into several sub-problems which can be optimized in parallel. Firstly, this paper describes the way to decompose the problem and the fundamental algorithm to solve it. The important point of this study is how to deal with the conjunctive constraints among the sub-problems and define an objective function in each sub-problem. Second, a numerical example is solved to show effectiveness of the parallel optimization method. Finally, in this paper, the parallel optimization method is applied to a shape and flight trajectory optimization problem of future space transportation vehicle, i.e. spaceplane. Spaceplane is said to be impossible to develop by present technologies. For this reason, most realistic shapes and flight trajectories of spaceplane are found. The effectiveness of the proposed parallel optimization method is also demonstrated.

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