22nd Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, Harrogate, UK, 28 August - 1st September, 2000
Paper ICAS 2000-2.11.2

AIRFOIL DESIGN OPTIMISATION USING NAVIER-STOKES EQUATIONS AND SIMULATED ANNEALING

S. L. Lee, M. Damodaran
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Keywords: aerodynamic shape design optimization, simulated annealing, cfd

This study is concerned with the application of the basic and a modified simulated annealing algorithm for optimizing aerodynamic objective functions representing transonic airfoil shape optimization problems and which are computed using an explicit finite volume multi-stage and a multi-grid method for solving the compressible Navier-Stokes equations. Airfoil shapes are represented by parametric functions to define the design variables which are altered during the optimization process. Integration of the optimization method, geometric definition and CFD to achieve feasible optimal shapes are demonstrated for the problem of inverse airfoil design and to the problem of maximizing the lift to drag ratio at a given flight condition. The study shows that the proposed approach is feasible in obtaining optimal aerodynamic shape, that the efficiency of the optimization process can be enhanced by modifying the basic simulated annealing and leads to improved designs than could be obtained using deterministic methods.

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