U-HARWARD will consider the use of innovative aerodynamic and aeroelastic designs in a multi-fidelity multi-disciplinary optimal design approach to facilitate the development of Ultra-High aspect ratio wings for large transport aircraft.

A conceptual design study, building on the current state of the art, will perform trade-off studies to determine the potential gains of different wing configurations and loads alleviation concepts in terms of aerodynamics, weight, noise, fuel-burn and range.

Scaled model wind tunnel tests will be used to validate parametric variations in the aerodynamic and acoustic characteristics. Starting from a reference aircraft, the preliminary design of the best candidate configuration will be completed and the estimated gains validated using high fidelity tools and a larger scale aeroelastic test.