Blended wing body with boundary layer ingestion conceptual design in a multidisciplinary design analysis optimization environment

This paper introduces the GENUS multidisciplinary concept level aircraft design and analysis environment developed by Cranfield University in recent years and it has been applied to the conceptual design of blended wing body (BWB) aircraft. Analytical disciplines include a variety of low-to-medium fidelity, physics-based and empirical methods, and aerodynamic analysis of high-order panel method. Boundary layer ingestion (BLI), as a special module, has been incorporated into the aerodynamic and propulsion analysis. The results of the Cranfield BW-11 are presented. In the highly-constrained design space, a type of highly fuel- efficient BWB concept can be studied, and the advantages of the BLI concept can also be explored based on this framework.