Airfoil Shape Optimization for Aircraft Design

Marc Secanell, MASc Candidate E-Mail: secanell@uvic.ca

During the first 100 years of powered flight, the aerospace industry has relied predominantly on experimental results and the knowledge of designers to develop new aircraft concepts. In recent years, new advances in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) have allowed engineers to obtain aerodynamic characteristics of new designs without the necessity of experiments. Parallel to these advances, designers have also obtained optimization techniques able to automatically tune design parameters to optimize the performance of their designs. In this work, an airfoil design tool is developed by coupling a CFD code and an optimization technique. This new design tool automatically finds the most efficient aerodynamic airfoil shapes. Such efficient shapes will help to achieve more fuel efficient and environmentally friendly aircrafts. The aerodynamic shape optimization problem solved in this work can be understood as a problem of obtaining an airfoil shape - represented by a set of parameters known as design variables - that will minimize/maximize a performance index subject to a set of specified constraints. An example of an objective might be the minimization of drag; an example of a constraint might be to satisfy a certain lift. In order to solve the aforementioned aerodynamic shape optimization problem the following are needed: a representation of the airfoil shape; a method to compute the aerodynamic characteristic s, and; an optimization problem solver. In this work, the airfoil is represented using a B-spline because it allows for a large variety of airfoil shapes, and because the B-spline is characterized by a small set of parameters, known as control points [1]. The former characteristic is useful because it guarantees that the optimum is not constrained by the type of shape representation. The latter characteristic is useful because the control points can be used as the design variables and with such a small number of design variables, the computational time necessary to solve the optimization problem will be reduced. The aerodynamic characteristics of the airfoil are computed using the CFD solver SPARC [2]. SPARC has the capabilities to be able to be executed in

distributed computer systems for maximum time efficiency and can solve accurately any type of flow regime. The optimization problem is solved using DOT, a gradient-based optimization package [3]. The basic idea of gradient-based optimization algorithms is to create a sequence of improved airfoils that converge to the optimal airfoil shape. In order to create this sequence of improved shapes, the values of objective function, constraints and their gradients in respect to the design variables (i.e. the control points of the B-spline) for each shape must be obtained. In summary, the optimization process implemented in the developed design tool is as follows. It begins with an initial airfoil shape. Then, SPARC computes its aerodynamic characteristics and the gradients of the aerodynamic characteristics with respect to the design variables. Then, the optimization algorithm, DOT, uses this information to obtain a new set of design variables that reduces the objective and satisfies the constraints. Using the resulting design variables, a new airfoil is created. The process is then repeated for the new airfoil until no further improvements can be made by the optimization routine. In conclusion, a design tool has been created to develop optimal airfoil shapes for aircraft wings, wind turbines blades and turbine blades to name but a few of its possible applications. Projected improvements of this program include the capacity to optimize three-dimensional shapes, such as wings and even full aircraft configurations. References: [1] J.A.Samareh. A survey of shape parameterization techniques. Langley International Forum on Aeroelasticity and Structural Dynamics, pp. 333-343. 1999 [2] Franco Magagnato. SPARC Manual (Structured Parallel Research Code). Department of F luid Machinery, Univeristy of Karlsruhe, Germany, 1999 [3] Vanderplaats R&D, Inc. DOT: Design Optimization Tools, Users Guide. v5.0, 2001