Description: During Phase I of this effort, ZONA Technology, Inc. significantly improved the medium fidelity design and analysis capability of NASA's MDAO architecture by successfully adding ZONA CAE tools such as ZAERO, ZEUS, ASTROS and ZMORPH synergistically integrated within a ModelCenter MDAO framework. In Phase II of this effort, ZONA aims to improve all the three tiers of NASA's MDAO architecture as follows: (1) The low fidelity capability will be enhanced by incorporating ZONAIR for providing flight loads (for structural design) and pressure differential (for sonic boom mitigation). ZONAIR will also 'flexiblize' rigid CFD loads for aeroelastic analyses, (2) the medium fidelity capability will be further extended by addition of new ModelCenter plug-ins and improvements in the existing plug-ins for ZONA CAE tools, for facilitating ease of design process, and (3) the high fidelity analyses capability will be augmented by the development of supportive software offering beneficial features such as automated surface+flowfield mesh morphing/generation, commonality of input within all branches of fidelity, etc. Rapid shape sensitivity generation capability will be offered with incorporation of ZEUS-DO into the framework. For ease of model-making and input setup process, a pre/post-processor software called ZONA-MV will be further improved with linkage to NASA's VSP tool. A NASTRAN-to-ASTROS finite element model converter will be developed. The overall development outcome of Phase I+II effort will then be combined as a 'ModelCenter.ZONA MDAO Pak' with on-demand cloud computing ability, unlimited tokens for massively parallelized optimization efforts, and will be perpetually licensed within all NASA Research Centers.

Benefits: NASA's current research efforts in aircraft design focus on improvements in performance, better fuel efficiency and noise/boom reduction of the next generation commercial aircraft. These design drivers call for investigation of unconventional and revolutionary design concepts for which the empirical structural and aerodynamic equations based on historical database may not be valid. ZONA's innovative modular MDAO sub-framework, once incorporated in the NASA MDAO systems, can provide variable-fidelity and physics-based structural, aerodynamic, and aeroelastic solutions, along with offering a supportive architecture for the solutions for other disciplines computed by the existing analysis codes available in the NASA MDAO systems, thereby solving a complete configuration design and optimization problem. With acceleration of convergence achieved through the POD-based order reduction and design space evolution technique, automated rapid mesh-morphing by ZMORPH, loads and pressure differential provided by ZONAIR, pre/post-analysis processing capability by ZONA-MV and system-level integration using ModelCenter, Phase I+II effort of this project will largely expand NASA's MDAO capability and enable the design of unconventional and revolutionary air vehicles in a computationally efficient and cost effective manner.

The components proposed to be developed in this effort for the MDAO suite are currently non-existent and/or are certainly needed to improve current capabilities of the commercially available MDAO software being used in the industry. Because of its many robust features beneficial to the air vehicle synthesis/ optimization, such as automated mesh generation +morphing capability, unified shape design variable definition for both structural and aerodynamic models, accelerated convergence through order reduction and design space evolution technique, and the streamlined ModelCenter-integrated process for the variable-fidelity structural, aerodynamic and aeroelastic solution generations, ZONA has discovered that the proposed MDAO suite has a unique commercial competitive edge in the air vehicle MDAO software market. ZONA's highly modular MDAO suite, offered as the 'ZONA-MDAO Pak' within Phoenix Integration's ModelCenter, can be adopted by the conceptual design and configuration development departments of airplane manufacturers nationwide and worldwide to develop a wide class of air vehicles such as UAVs/UCAVs, supersonic business jets and transports, advanced transonic transports, fighter aircraft, hypersonic missiles, and winged projectiles.