Fast and accurate airfoil design under uncertainty using non-intrusive polynomial chaos (NIPC) expansions and utility functions is proposed. The NIPC expansions provide a means to efficiently and accurately compute statistical information for a given set of input variables with associated probability distribution. Utility functions provide a way to rigorously formulate the design problem. In this work, these two methods are integrated...

Purpose – Strategies for accelerated multi-objective optimization of aerodynamic surfaces are investigated, including the possibility of exploiting surrogate modeling techniques for computational fluid dynamic (CFD)-driven design speedup of such surfaces. The purpose of this paper is to reduce the overall optimization time. Design/methodology/approach – An algorithmic framework is described that is composed of: a search space reduction,...

Aerodynamic design is inherently a multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem. Determining the best possible trade-offs between conflicting aerodynamic objectives can be computationally challenging when carried out directly at the level of high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics simulations. This paper presents a computationally cheap methodology for exploration of aerodynamic design trade-offs. In particular, point-by-point...

A brief review of some recent variable-fidelity aerodynamic shape optimization methods is presented.We discuss three techniques that—by exploiting information embedded in low-fidelity computationalfluid dynamics (CFD) models—are able to yield a satisfactory design at a low computational cost, usu-ally corresponding to a few evaluations of the original, high-fidelity CFD model to be optimized. Thespecific techniques considered here...

Exploration of design tradeoffs for aerodynamic surfaces requires solving of multi-objective optimization (MOO) problems. The major bottleneck here is the time-consuming evaluations of the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model used to capture the nonlinear physics involved in designing aerodynamic surfaces. This, in conjunction with a large number of simulations necessary to yield a set of designs representing the best possible...