Structural Design and Analysis of a Blended-Wing-Body (BWB) Ultra-High Capacity Military Cargo Transport

A Blended Wing Body (BWB) configuration is an innovative aircraft concept that promises high aerodynamic efficiency compared to conventional aircraft. However, unlike conventional aircraft configurations with circular fuselage cross sections, the major structural design challenge with BWB is the wide non-circular fuselage centre section, where it has to withstand both internal cabin pressures and wing bending loads. Several solutions have been proposed for the structural design of the BWB centre section, such as Top Surface Panel Plate models, Multi-Bubble model and the Y-Braced Box Fuselage to minimise the weight penalty. However, they contain a large number of separated compartments which is not particularly suitable for a cargo transport that requires a large and contiguous cargo compartment to carry bulk payload. The aim of this project is to design an efficient structural configuration for an ultra-high capacity military cargo aircraft using a BWB configuration which will be able to carry up to ten M1A2 Abram battle tanks (1,200,000 lbs) with a range of 5,000 NM.The Columned Multi-Bubble (CMB) is analysed and compared with the conventional Multi-Bubble and Flat shell models to verify their structural performance regarding weight and deformation. Finite Element Analysis (FEA) has been used on CAD generated models to achieve an efficient structural configuration. The paper will introduce the objective of the project and present preliminary structural analysis results.