Design, analysis & optimization of a small unmanned aircraft

A small unmanned aircraft was designed and manufactured. The aim was to fulfill the specifications and achieve high performance for the 17th annual AIAA Design/Build/Fly (DBF) challenge. After the competition authors continued further study and the outcome of the study is presented here which could be used to improve existing design. Design process was driven by the individual mission targets and optimizing between them. After selecting the aircraft configurations, starting design point was selected using sizing trades. After that MDO (multi-disciplinary optimization) was initiated and continued until the design converged to a feasible solution. Basic aerodynamic and flight mechanics theory was used beside various computational methods during preliminary design.