A Study of Shape Parameterisation Methods for Airfoil Optimisation

This paper presents a study on parameterisation methods for airfoil shape optimisation within a CAD-based design optimisation framework. The objective of the paper is to study the effect of different methods on airfoil shape optimisation when using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Parameterisation of geometry is one of the essential requirements in shape optimisation, and it presents further challenges when carrying out multidisciplinary design optimisation, as it is critically important to maintain shape consistency between analysis domains, while providing different analysis models from the same CAD definition. It is usually the case that there are numerous possibilities in defining the parametric model, and it will prescribe to a large extent the scope of the search space and landscape of the objective function. This paper adopts design of experiments and optimisation approaches to study several representative parameterisation methods in terms of flexibility and accuracy of the methods for aerodynamic shape optimisation.