Formulation of an IPPD Methodology for the Design of a Supersonic Business Jet

The growth of international markets as well as business partnerships between U.S. and Asian-based firms has lead to an increased interest in an economically viable business jet capable of supersonic cruise and trans-Pacific range with one stop over (or non-stop trans-Atlantic range) 1 . Such an aircraft would reduce the travel time to these regions by as much as 50% by increasing cruise Mach number from roughly 0.85 to 2.0. In response to this interest, the 1996 AIAA / United Technologies / Pratt and Whitney Individual Undergraduate Design Competition has issued a Request for Proposal for the conceptual design of a supersonic cruise business jet. The design of this aircraft considered both performance and economic issues in the conceptual design phase. Through the use of Response Surface Methodology (RSM) and Design of Experiments (DoE) techniques, the aerodynamics of this vehicle were modeled and incorporated into an aircraft sizing code, FLOPS. This program was then combined with an aircraft life-cycle cost routine, ALCCA, and response surfaces were created for the optimization of an Overall Evaluation Criterion (OEC) which considered both mission capability (i.e. payload, range, OEW) and affordability issues (i.e. life cycle cost, acquisition cost). The OEC for this study and was determined through a Quality Function Deployment analysis considering both the voice of the customer and the voice of the engineer. Using a Robust Design Simulation (RDS) approach, an economic uncertainty analysis was performed to optimize the aircraft (i.e. maximize the OEC) while minimizing the sensitivity of these parameters to fluctuations in variables over which the designer has no control (i.e. fuel cost, number of vehicles produced, etc.). The result is an aircraft which can cruise at Mach 2.0 for 3160 nm (satisfying all mission range requirements), weighs 60314 lb, has a balanced field length of less than 7000 ft, and has a mean acquisition cost of $37.523 million in 1992 dollars.