Inverse Design of Airfoils Using Target Pressure Optimization

The Direct Iterative Surface Curvature (DISC) airfoil design method developed by NASA Langley, which is one of the inverse design methods, is robust and effective. In order to determine the target pressure distributions of airfoils, this paper used the uniformed B-spline interpolation for the parameterization of the target pressure, and a Genetic Algorithm (GA) was used to optimize the coordinates of the control points of the B-spline functions. Two cases were given to prove the effect of the DISC design method. A laminar flow airfoil was then designed using DISC after a target pressure had been determined by a GA. Results show that the DISC method based on target pressure optimization using GAs is pretty effective.