Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Archives of Computational Methods in Engineering, 2026 (SCI-Expanded, Scopus)
The problem of determining the trim condition of an aircraft plays a crucial role in analyzing flight capability by maintaining flight stability in various flight modes. This is achieved by adjusting parameters such as aerodynamic angles, Euler angles of the aircraft, and various control parameters, by examining the balance of forces and moments from nonlinear equations of motion transformed into equilibrium equations at steady-state conditions. These conditions are determined by the dynamic flight conditions, and numerical calculation methods are used to solve this problem using optimization techniques. This study presents a performance comparison of two gradient-based optimizers and ten metaheuristics. To ensure diversity in comparison, experiments are conducted on various trim condition cases and multiple aircraft models. The performance evaluation of each algorithm focuses on key criteria: computational resource usage, convergence speed, consistency, and computational complexity. There are twenty optimization problems consisting of five trim conditions of four aircraft configurations. From the obtained results, gradient-based optimizers can outperform metaheuristics in all problems. SQP is the best optimizer in this study. L-SHADE is the best algorithm among the metaheuristics, but its performance is still obviously worse than the gradient-based optimizers. Conclusively, gradient-based optimizers are obviously more suitable for aircraft trim problems in this study.