ILR master thesis wins Excellence Prize

RWTH graduate Yves Heuschling has been awarded the Enovos Foundation Excellence Award for his master's thesis written at ILR. This distinction which is accompanied by a prize of €2,500 is conferred annually by the Enovos Foundation and its partners to engineering students with outstanding master's theses in Luxembourg. In this 10th award ceremony, the thesis entitled "Development of a methodology for the preliminary wing design with the help of an aerodynamic airfoil database" was able to convince the jury and secure one of the total of six prizes.

The objective of the awarded work was the development of a novel methodology for preliminary (laminar) wing design utilizing an aerodynamic airfoil database. In addition to minimum user specifications, the methodology thus takes into account given aerodynamic airfoil data. Using an automated airfoil selection process according to selected weighting parameters, an initial reference wing is iteratively adapted and optimized with respect to its performance. This procedure allows the aerodynamics of the airfoils to be taken into account already during wing design, thus achieving increased efficiency. In addition to the development and implementation, the methodology was validated via initial studies and subsequently optimized in terms of accuracy and required computing time.

The results of the thesis were incorporated into the AVACON project funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy as part of the Federal Aviation Research Programme LuFo V-3 and provide an excellent basis for further research at ILR.

Scientific supervision: Tim Effing, M.Sc.