The Royal Aeronautical Society’s 5th Aircraft Structural Design Conference, undertaken with the support of the University of Mancheser, will address the challenges facing the designers of the next generation of aircraft. These arise because the new designs will need to meet strict environmental constraints and will be subject to ever increasing pressures for reductions in manufacturing and life-cycle costs and continual improvements in overall performance/efficiency factors. The resulting aircraft will be complex, requiring multi-disciplinary design approaches and solutions in a distributed design environment.

The scope of the conference covers both airframe and engines. This includes consideration of innovative forms and design scenarios together with the challenges resulting from considering the complete aircraft life-cycle, from initial concept to final disposal. The design and analysis of structures constructed from CFRP and novel materials is a major topic area for the conference. These challenges need complex and innovative design solutions that often require the use of interdisciplinary and dynamically interactive design methods that may be supported by knowledge based engineering tools. In addition, today’s design teams are multinational, distributed across continents or the globe, and the computational methods employed must be able to support a distributed work environment. The control of such complexity in the designs and the design process is a major issue that the conference wishes to address.