Getting the full benefits of CFD in conceptual design
William Mason, Duane Knill, Anthony Giunta, Bernard Grossman, Layne T. Watson, Raphael T. Haftka · 1998
The applied aerodynamics community is struggling to develop a means of incorporating computational fluid dynamics (CFD) into the early stages of aircraft systems design, where it can have the greatest impact on vehicle design. This paper describes developments in computational methodology arising from research into multidisciplinary optimization (MDO) done recently by the authors that addresses this problem. The premise is that advanced CFD should be used to precompute a database of solutions which is then interpolated during the process. Design of experiments theory is used to select the conditions or design points used to populate the database, and statistical methods are then used to develop a mathematical model of the CFD solutions which is used to interpolate the database. The specific we use, called response surface models are quadratic least squares fits to functions of the CFD results. Populating the database is made possible through the use of coarse grained parallel computing. We demonstrate the method using a recent example from our MDO work.