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Aerodynamic design via control theory

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Conclusion

The purpose of the last three sections is to demonstrate by representative examples that control theory can be used to formulate computationally feasible procedures for aerodynamic design. The cost of each iteration is of the same order as two flow solutions, since the adjoint equation is of comparable complexity to the flow equation, and the remaining auxiliary equations could be solved quite inexpensively. Provided, therefore, that one can afford the cost of a moderate number of flow solutions, procedures of this type can be used to derive improved designs. The approach is quite general, not limited to particular choices of the coordinate transformation or cost function, which might in fact contain measures of other criteria of performance such as lift and drag. For the sake of simplicity certain complicating factors, such as the need to include a special term in the mapping function to generate a corner at the trailing edge, have been suppressed from the present analysis. Also it remains to explore the numerical implementation of the design procedures proposed in this paper.

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  1. Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University, 08544, Princeton, New Jersey

    Antony Jameson

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Jameson, A. Aerodynamic design via control theory. J Sci Comput 3, 233–260 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01061285

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