Winner of the AIAA Summerfield Book Award and the Aviation/Space Writers Association Award of Excellence, AIAA's best-selling textbook presents the entire process of aircraft conceptual design-from requirements definition to initial sizing, configuration layout, analysis, sizing, optimization, and trade studies. Widely used in industry and government aircraft design groups, Aircraft Design: A Conceptual Approach is also the design text at major universities around the world. A virtual encyclopedia of engineering, it is known for its completeness, easy-to-read style, and real-world approach to the process of design. In this sixth edition Dr Raymer has expanded and updated his presentation of fast-moving technologies, added lots of new material, and re-written introductory material to make it even more user-friendly. Given the ever-growing importance of electric propulsion, Raymer has added a whole new chapter entitled Electric Aircraft. This presents technologies, design-to guidance, and rules of thumb, and offers electric aircraft performance and sizing equations derived in a format familiar to those designing conventionally-powered airplanes. This encyclopedic book covers every topic necessary to the understanding of aircraft design. Preliminary sizing, aerodynamics, structures, stability and control, propulsion, configuration layout, performance, cost analysis, and much more are all presented starting from first principles and building to a set of tools allowing the reader to actually do a realistic job of aircraft conceptual design. All topics are presented from the point of view of the aircraft designer, not the specialist in any given topic area. After 19 Chapters detailing the way to design normal aircraft, Raymer concludes with four more chapters describing the design of more-exotic flight vehicles including electric aircraft, helicopters, vertical takeoff jets, hypersonic aircraft, launch vehicles, airships, flying wings, forward-swept wings, asymmetric airplanes, and much more.

Aircraft Design

by Daniel P. Raymer

Published 30 June 1992
This best-selling textbook presents the entire process of aircraft conceptual design - from requirements definition to initial sizing, configuration layout, analysis, sizing, optimization, and trade studies. Widely used in industry and government aircraft design groups, ""Aircraft Design: A Conceptual Approach"" is also the design text at major universities around the world. A virtual encyclopedia of engineering, it is known for it's completeness, easy-to-read style, and real-world approach to the process of design. Special features: more than 900 pages of design methods, illustrations, tips, explanations, and equations; overviews of lofting, subsystems, maintainability, producibility, vulnerability, and stealth; concepts and calculation methods for aerodynamics, stability and control, propulsion, structures, weights, performance, and cost; coverage of conventional and unconventional design methods, including UAV, canard, tandem wing, C-wing, oblique wing, asymmetrical, multi-fuselage, wing-in-ground-effect, and more; and, VTOL, helicopter, spacecraft, launch vehicle, hypersonic, and airship design.New topics include: advice on how to become an aircraft designer; electric aircraft, batteries, fuel cells, and solar cells; green airplanes, including biofuels, GTL, hydrogen, methane, and nuclear; active aeroelastic wing and advanced tailless concepts; and enhanced learning materials, including chapter opening summaries with set-the-stage art, descriptive sidebar definitions and tips, and what-we-learned chapter wrap-ups.