Efficient Aerodynamic Optimization of Aircraft Wings

Abstract

Multidisciplinary design and optimization is a promising methodology for the efficient design of complex systems, in particular when it combines coupled analyses with gradient-based optimization techniques. In this case, it requires the derivatives evaluation of the functions of interest with respect to the design variables, which is the most demanding computational task in the process, so the goal of this work is to develop an efficient optimization framework to solve aerodynamic design problems using exact gradient information. To this end, the aerodynamic model based on the panel method is reformulated into five smaller modules, in which the respective sensitivity analysis blocks are constructed using exact gradient estimation methods: automatic differentiation, symbolic differentiation and the adjoint method. After the aerodynamic and corresponding sensitivity analysis tools are verified numerically, aerodynamic optimization problems are solved using the new tool with remarkable success since, when compared to the finite-differences method, the optimization time can be reduced by 90%.