Multi-Level Surrogate-Based Airfoil Shape Optimization
Slawomir Marcin Koziel, Leifur Leifsson · 51st AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting including the New Horizons Forum and Aerospace Exposition · 2013
Robust and computationally efficient airfoil shape optimization algorithm is presented. Our technique exploits a set of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models of increasing discretization density that are sequentially optimized with the optimal design of the “coarser” model being the initial design for the “finer” one. The final design is refined using a response surface approximation model constructed from the coarse-discretization CFDsimulation data and corrected using single high-fidelity evaluation. The presented technique is easy to implement. Operation of our algorithm is demonstrated using several test cases of transonic airfoils. In all instances, an optimized design is obtained at a low computational cost corresponding to a few high-fidelity CFD simulations. Our results are compared to other optimization techniques, both conventional and surrogate-based ones.