A conceptual design tool to support high-speed vehicle design

This paper aims at presenting an integrated multidisciplinary methodology and the related software tool, called ASTRID-H, developed at Politecnico di Torino to support the conceptual and preliminary design phases of high-speed vehicles. Based on the experience in the development of innovative methodologies to cope with complex and highly integrated aircraft, ASTRID-H has been developed to guide students, researchers and engineers through the very first phases of the design of high-speed vehicles. ASTRID-H supports the users to move from the statistical evaluation of the guess data and the identification of the design space to the geometrical characterization of the vehicle guaranteeing a proper integration of the main subsystems. Already available and widely used mathematical models are here integrated in a new algorithm to face the complexity of the design of high-speed vehicles. In addition, the coefficients of the semi-empirical models that were not focusing on high-speed vehicles have been updated to widen classical theories to cover high-speed vehicles. The resulting implemented methodology allows the users to cope with complex multidisciplinary problems, which encompass a variety of interrelated disciplines and heterogeneous levels of fidelity. Furthermore, this paper reports the some of the main results achieved during the validation of the methodology thanks to the application to the STRATOFLY MR3 vehicle case study. STRATOFLY MR3 is a Mach 8 waverider configuration that stems from more than a decade of European research activities in the field of high-speed and currently under investigation in the Horizon 2020 STRATOFLY Project.