Abstract

Safety assessment is paramount in aircraft design. For unconventional aircraft or aircraft with novel propulsion or system architectures or technologies, it is critical to investigate safety as early as possible in the design process to eliminate unfeasible aircraft configurations and system architectures. In this context, the Zonal Safety Analysis (ZSA) and the Particular Risk Analysis (PRA) that evaluate the safety aspects from an aircraft configuration and system placement perspective are essential to perform early. These analyses require a three-dimensional (3D) model of the aircraft and systems and substantial manual effort, limiting the ability to perform rapid iterations required to support design space exploration and, eventually, multidisciplinary design optimization. To analyze many aircraft configurations and system architectures, parametric 3D modelling, ZSA, and PRA require automation. This thesis reviews the methodologies for performing the ZSA and PRA from a systems point of view and proposes a novel methodology for semi-automated conceptual-level ZSA and PRA (CZSA and CPRA) implemented using Python and OpenVSP. As part of CZSA, automated aircraft 3D modelling, parametric zone definition, and zone-component interaction analysis methods are developed that are supported by a manually prepared database of safety-driven best practices. The CPRA involves parametric modelling of particular risk threat zones for trajectory-based PRAs and automated detection of system components in these zones. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated with case studies for conventional and unconventional aircraft designs and novel system technologies. The presented work is a step towards integrating system safety analysis into multidisciplinary analysis and optimization environments, thus increasing conceptual design maturity and reducing development time.