Development and implementation of an advanced, design-sensitive method for wing weight estimation

This paper presents the development of an advanced, quasi-analytical method for aircraft wing weight estimation and its detailed technical implementation. Similar to other quasi-analytical methods, it makes use of elementary wing box sizing techniques to compute the amount and distribution of material required to resist the applied loads, in combination with empirical methods to estimate all the other weight contributions. However, a new analytical derivation of the so-called airfoil effective distance parameter and a new advanced load estimation approach have been developed, which allow achieving a higher level of accuracy and design sensitivity than any other similar method found in literature. The proposed wing weight prediction method has been validated using data of various airplanes of different size, category and manufacturer. The computational time is dramatically lower than any finite element based sizing tool, while the achieved level of accuracy is comparable or even higher. Each weight prediction takes few seconds on a standard PC, while the average error on the total wing weight is consistently lower than 2%. The high level of design sensitivity allows the designers to assess the effect of design choices such as different airfoils and planform shapes, different structural layouts and materials, including both metal and composites, etc. The resulting combination of speed, accuracy and high level of design sensitivity makes of the proposed tool also a suitable asset for multidisciplinary design optimization studies.