An inverse approach for airfoil design

Abstract

Inverse design methods directly compute geometry for specified design parameters such as surface pressure or velocity, which is related to the performance of an airfoil (or a blade) geometry. These methods replace the time consuming iterative procedure of direct methods in which a large number of different blade shapes are designed and analysed to find the one which creates the surface velocity or pressure distribution closest to the desired one. In this paper a viscous inverse method for airfoil design is described. The inverse design approach computes an airfoil shape based on the target surface pressure distribution. The re-design of an airfoil, starting from an initial arbitrary profile in subsonic flow regimes, demonstrates the merits and robustness of this approach. © 2008 WIT Press.