Stability-Driven Preliminary Blended Wing Body Design With Foresight for Hydrogen Fuel Adoption

A critical oversight in the design of blended wing body aircraft is the lack of stability and handling quality considerations from the outset of conceptualization. This paper, therefore, seeks to quantify how hydrogen storage requirements alter mass distribution and inertial properties, evaluate effects on handling qualities, and propose a methodology for obtaining optimized control-surface configurations to address stability challenges. To explore the potential integration of emerging alternative energy sources, this study assesses two powertrains: a conventional Jet-A-fueled variant, most likely in a 2035 timeframe, and a 2050 liquid hydrogen (LH2)-fueled variant. The capabilities of the computational tool used in this study, RCAIDE, are extended by coupling weight and inertia estimations with a surrogate-based vortex-lattice method to derive stability derivatives and handling qualities. A case study exploring the design of a 150-passenger, 4,000-nautical-mile blended wing body aircraft is then undertaken to illustrate the benefits and challenges of integrating hydrogen propulsion architectures and establish stability considerations as fundamental design drivers rather than secondary constraints. \end{abstract}