Inflatable airfoil structure optimization on flying wing Buoyancy-lifting unmanned aerial vehicles

As a kind of entire lifting surfaces to generate lift, flying wing buoyancy-lifting unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have currently raised wide concerns in the field of military affairs and the civil use. The aircraft collects the advantages from fixed-wing UAVs and traditional aerostats to perform better aerodynamic characteristics with less volume. However, it is a challenge to determine the inflatable wing configuration in the basis of the anticipative smooth airfoil. This paper presents a novel inflatable airfoil structure multi-objective optimization design of flying wing buoyancy-lifting unmanned aerial vehicles based on improved non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) to achieve an approximate fitting to the ideal model in spite of constraints from various aspects. A combination of difference minimization and mass minimization strategies is used to bring equilibrium between the aerodynamic performance and the mass of the structure with relatively independent decision variables. The resulting structural model has noteworthy capabilities for the inflatable airfoil to represent the rigid smooth one with excellent aerodynamics; therefore, it makes a great sense for the area of the flying wing buoyancy-lifting aircraft.