RCAIDE: A multidisciplinary analysis toolbox for aircraft design and flight simulation

The maturation of several enabling technologies has brought aircraft conceptualization back to the forefront of modern engineering systems design. Unfortunately, the development of tools capable of assessing unconventional configurations and powertrain architectures has not kept pace. To accelerate progress in the multidisciplinary design and analysis of novel aircraft, we introduce the Research Community Aerospace Interdisciplinary Design Environment (RCAIDE), a Python-based, open-source platform for modeling, analyzing, and optimizing both conventional and unconventional aerospace systems. The successor to the globally recognized SUAVE code, RCAIDE builds on a robust foundation of methods while extending its scope to address novel design paradigms that constitute emerging technologies. RCAIDE’s modular structure supports high-performance parallel computing and multi-fidelity analysis, thereby unlocking computationally intensive operations such as uncertainty quantification and generative artificial intelligence applications. This paper documents the validation of the most frequently employed methods across various disciplines within the tool and demonstrates how a novel, generalized approach to defining energy networks can be leveraged to model both conventional and emerging propulsion architectures. A collection of case studies spanning different aircraft classes is subsequently presented to highlight the code’s versatility and value to academia, industry, government, and the broader aerospace community.