The inverse design methods for aerodynamic shapes face significant challenges, especially in specifying reasonable distributions of target pressure and achieving the comprehensive optimization of aerodynamic characteristics. To overcome the limitations of existing inverse design methods, a nonlinear dimensionality reduction method based on topographic mapping was proposed. In this work, a high-precision bidirectional mapping between aerodynamic shape and its pressure distributions and low-dimensional latent space variables was built using the generative topographic mapping (GTM) model. This method, combined with the genetic algorithm, could provide efficient optimization in the latent space without the computational fluid dynamics iteration, yielding the optimal pressure distribution and the corresponding aerodynamic shape. It did not require the target pressure distribution to have direct physical significant, but instead uses coefficients to integrate the target pressure distribution and different aerodynamic performances into a hybrid objective function, achieving comprehensive aerodynamic optimization. In addition, this method was applied to high-speed natural laminar flow (HSNLF)(1)–0213 airfoil. The results revealed that a local pressure distribution of the optimal airfoil was close to the target distribution, and the total drag was reduced by 15.3%. Moreover, this method was applied to the complex multi-objective optimization design of the XN12 rotor airfoil, considering various performance metrics such as the maximum lift coefficient, cruise drag reduction, and drag divergence Mach number. The results demonstrated that the drag divergence Mach number of the optimized airfoil was significantly improved, achieving a balance between various performance metrics.
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