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Lutz, Th.

Airfoil Design and Optimization


The aerodynamic eciency of mildly swept wings is mainly inuenced by the characteristics of the airfoil sections. The specic design of airfoils is therefore one of the classical tasks of aerodynamics. Since the airfoil characteristics are directly dependent on the inviscid pressure distribution the application of inverse calculation methods is obvious. The direct numerical airfoil optimization oers an alternative to the manual design and attracts increasing interest. 1. Inverse Subsonic Airfoil Design In order to nd a proper airfoil shape for a specic aerodynamic application dierent approaches may be used. In former times, when no theoretical methods were available, relevant geometric parameters were varied systematically and the eect on the aerodynamic characteristics was measured in a series of wind-tunnel tests. The rst extensive experimental investigations in this sense were performed at the AVA after completion of the Gttinger low-speed o wind-tunnel in 1917/1918. After L. Prandtl developed the boundary-layer theory it became obvious that the outer-ow velocity distribution along the airfoil surface determines the airfoil performance. This gave reason to develop inverse methods which enable the calculation of the airfoil contour from a given velocity distribution. First methods for the approximate inverse solution of the Laplace equation were developed in the late twenties and the thirties. Exact solutions based on a conformal mapping procedure were proposed by Mangler (1938) and Lighthill (1945). When inverse methods were available, knowledge was established how to shape the velocity distribution in order to obtain favourable airfoil characteristics, e. g. with respect to minimum drag or maximum lift. A milestone represent the well-known NACA laminar ow airfoils designed in the late thirties. As further examples the investigations of Eppler, Stratford and Wortmann should be mentioned. A signicant progress in airfoil design was achieved in the fties by coupling the potential-ow methods with integral boundary-layer procedures to consider viscous eects. Since then, a large number of subsonic airfoil design tools were developed, for example the Eppler/Somers code or the methods of Drela. In the hands of experienced users such methods enable a carefully directed design and the adaption of the airfoil characteristics to specic applications. A good example in this respect is documented in the progress achieved in the aerodynamic performance of modern sailplanes. A signicant portion of the improvements can be attributed to the sucessful design of low-drag laminar ow airfoils (e. g. DU, E, FX or HQ airfoils). Another signicant amount of investigations on inverse methods for the regime of transonic ows were performed in the seventies after the discovery of the supercritical airfoils. Due to the availability of supercomputers it is nowadays possible to handle semi-inverse solutions of the Euler equation, the coupled Euler boundary-layer equations or even for the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations. 2. Direct Numerical Airfoil Optimization An alternative to the inverse or semi-inverse procedure is oered by direct numerical optimization. With this approach an automated search for an optimal solution with respect to a user-specied objective function, e. g. minimzation of drag, is performed. This is done by means of an iterative variation of the chosen design variables. To parameterize the airfoil contour mostly geometric shape functions are applied with the respective coecients representing the design variables. The choice of a proper optimization algorithm strongly depends on the topology of the considered objective function, the airfoil parameterization, the number of design variables and nally on the eciency of the aerodynamic model. In general, gradient methods converge fast for simple topologies of the objective function but one may be trapped in a local optimum if a multimodal objective function is considered. Stochastic algorithms oer a greater chance to avoid this problem and can also cope with complex topologies but usually require much more iterations. The combination of stochastic optimizers with costly high-accuracy ow-solvers, e. g. based on the solution of the RANS equations, is therefore still limited to a relatively small number of design variables.

Numerical optimizations of subsonic airfoils featuring a detailed representation of the complete contour are hardly known. To reduce the computational eort, potential-ow methods coupled with integral boundary-layer procedures are preferred for the aerodynamic analysis, the number of optimization cycles is limited and a moderate number of design variables (usually below 10 15) is considered. Actually, most of the numerically optimized subsonic airfoils published so far show a great similarity to the initial shape. 3. Example on Numerical Shape Optimization of Subsonic NLF Airfoils The objective of numerical optimizations performed by the present author was to design natural laminar ow (NLF) airfoils which show minimized average drag for a user-specied design lift region [1], [2]. In order to enable a detailed airfoil representation a large number of 34 design variables was considered. Contrary to the usual approach the airfoil was not parameterized by geometric shape functions. Instead, an inverse conformal mapping procedure according to Eppler was applied to generate the airfoil contour. The input parameters of this method directly control the local outer-ow velocity gradient and nally the boundarylayer development. A spline representation of the critical leading-edge region is avoided with this approach. The potential-ow method was coupled with an integral boundary-layer procedure utilizing closure relations according to Eppler for laminar ow. The method proposed by Drela with a new shape-factor relation is used to calculate turbulent boundary-layers. To predict the laminar to turbulent transition location, an en database method based on spatial stability analysis for Falkner-Skan self-similar proles was implemented. The effect of short transitional separation bubbles is considered by means of a new ecient bubble model. The complete aerodynamic model was coupled with a commercial hybrid optimizer which consists of a combination of genetic algorithm, downhill simplex and a gradient method. One optimization result is depicted in Figs. 1 and 2. The objective was to minimize the average drag coecient for angles of attack design = [2 , 3 , ..., 8 ] relative to the zero-lift line. Two Reynolds numbers were considered, namely Redesign = 3 106 and 9 106 . In order to prevent a breakdown in lift at o-design conditions and to enhance the stall characteristics, the curvature of the lift curve was limited for = [2 , 3 , ..., 15 ]. The resulting airfoil shows features which are well-known from manual airfoil design such as smooth transition ramps or a Stratford-like turbulent pressure recovery on the lower side (see Fig. 1).
1.5 cl 1.0 Present method, ncrit. = 11.13 Eppler code Experiment IAG

Figure 1: Inviscid velocity distribution for the optimized airfoil

Re=3x106

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Figure 2: Predicted and measured drag polar for the optimized airfoil

Wind-tunnel tests for the optimized airfoil showed very low drag coecients inside the laminar bucket which exactly coincides with the design lift region, see Fig. 2. The optimization method has furthermore been applied to design of airfoils which show minimized trailing-edge noise or minimal derivation to a user-specied drag polar. 4. References
1 Lutz, Th.: Berechnung und Optimierung subsonisch umstrmter Prole und Rotationskrper. VDI FortschrittBerichte, o o Reihe 7: Strmungstechnik, Nr. 378, ISBN 3-18-337807-8. o 2 Lutz, Th. and Wagner, S.: Numerical Shape Optimization of Subsonic Airfoil Sections. Proc. ECCOMAS 2000: European Congress on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences and Engineering, Barcelona, September 1114, 2000.

Addresses: Thorsten Lutz, Institute for Aerodynamics and Gas Dynamics, University of Stuttgart (IAG), Pfaenwaldring 21, D-70550 Stuttgart, email: lutz@iag.uni-stuttgart.de

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