Determination of revolutionary requirements boundaries for a high-speed, airbreathing propulsion system

Modern propulsion system design and selection for future air-vehicle systems is an inherently uncertain process. The long lead-times in the development of new propulsion systems produce significant levels amount of risk for the propulsion system manufacturer. Additionally, this long lead-time allows a tremendous amount of program inertia to build up as the development process progresses. This inertia prohibits the propulsion system manufacturer from reacting to "catastrophic" changes in the system requirements. It can be shown that there exist certain regions in the system requirements hyper-space where a small change in a given requirement or requirements requires a completely different solution. Additionally, because of the inherent security associated with evolving current designs; there exists in the engineering community a reluctance to develop truly new and revolutionary technologies and systems. Therefore it is of interest to develop a method by which the location of catastrophic boundaries can be discerned. The method chosen to investigate the requirements hyper-space for supersonic cruise propulsion systems is a genetic algorithm (GA). The GA was used to determine both individual and combined technology limit boundaries and to determine the effect of technology infusion on these boundaries. © 2002 by Peter Hollingsworth & Dimitri Mavris.