Aircraft structural sizing with the Carrera’s beam formulation

This paper presents the development of a new code implemented from scratch in C++ for advanced structural analysis, based on the Carrera Unified Formulation (CUF). CUF, due to its ability to provide a unified description of deformations and stresses, proves to be a powerful tool for the analysis of one-dimensional structures. The implementation of the code focused on obtaining accurate results and optimizing calculation times by integrating an Automatic Differentiation (AD) system. This system allows the efficient calculation of the derivatives required for gradient-based optimization techniques, with particular emphasis on the adjoint approach. In addition, support for parallelization via MPI (Message Passing Interface) greatly improved the performance and scalability of the program. The primary objective of this research is to improve the methodologies and tools used in advanced structural analysis to provide engineers and researchers with more effective and efficient tools to tackle complex structural engineering challenges.