Multidisciplinary Optimization Design of an Airship Considering Temperature-Rise Effect

During stratospheric airship station-keeping missions, the pronounced temperature-rise effect directly affects aerodynamic drag and power generation efficiency, yet most existing design optimization studies tend to neglect it, potentially leading to biased performance assessments. Thus, an aerodynamic–thermal multidisciplinary optimization framework was developed in this study for a stratospheric airship considering temperature-rise effects. High-fidelity simulations were employed to construct surrogate models for drag coefficient and daily power generation, and these models were subsequently integrated into a multidisciplinary optimization framework aimed at minimizing the total system mass. The optimization results show that, compared with the baseline optimal design, the globally optimized configuration is slenderer, the location of the maximum diameter shifts forward, and the nose and tail contraction becomes smoother. For the solar array layout, the optimized design is also shifted forward, with a shorter axial coverage range, and greater concentration in the fore and middle regions of the envelope. The optimized configuration reduces the combined mass of the propulsion, energy, and structural subsystems, resulting in an approximately 10% reduction in the total system mass. These results demonstrate that incorporating temperature-rise effects into multidisciplinary optimization can significantly affect the optimal design and provide a more realistic assessment of stratospheric airship performance during station-keeping operations. Both Bas and Opt use the temperature-coupled surrogate models; therefore, their comparison evaluates the benefit of full-variable co-design rather than a temperature-on/temperature-off ablation.