A new multidisciplinary approach to RLV design

This paper describes a multidisciplinary approach to the design of RLVs. In particular the analysis is focused on two stages to orbit RLVs with a waverider-based configuration and a rocket H₂/O₂ propulsive system. In this paper, trajectory control, thermal protection, propulsive system and aerodynamics analyses are performed for both launch and re-entry phases for many different configurations. In order to reduce the computational cost, the search for optimal configurations has been performed by building surrogate models, or metamodels, of the problems with a minimal sampling of the constraint and objective functions associated to each discipline. Kriging response surfaces have been chosen to represent the launch and the re-entry phases and a novel online adaptation of the response surface has been developed to incrementally make the metamodel as close as possible to the physical problem. Solutions found with this approach are then used to reconstruct the Pareto front for the launch and re-entry objective functions.