ABSTRACT
The local rib design was then manufactured in both plastic and aluminum to show the capabilities of additive manufacturing with aircraft components. A computer-aided design model of the wing was developed and inserted into Altair's virtual wind tunnel computational fluid dynamics (CFD) program. The static loading conditions were obtained through CFD analysis of the wing and the results were applied to calculate the baseline displacement, von-Mises stresses, and buckling conditions. Topology optimization (TO) was then performed both locally on the ribs of wing and on a global scale where the entire internal structure of the wing acted as the design space. Areas where the TO created high-density elements, notably near the root of the wing along the main spar, were considered a template for the fuel tank. The TO method used is the power-law approach, otherwise referred to as the simple isotropic material with penalization method.
