Cad-based Aerodynamic Shape Design Optimization with the Dlr Tau Code

With the improving capabilities of Computational Fluids Dynamics (CFD) on predicting aerodynamic performance, these tools are now being increasingly used for aerodynamic design optimization in the aerospace industry. In this paper, an automated optimization framework is presented to address inviscid aerodynamic design problems. Key aspects of this framework include the use of the continuous adjoint methodology to make the computational requirements independent from the number of design variables and Computer Aided Design (CAD) based shape parameterization, which uses the flexibility of Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS) to handle complex configurations.