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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Shape design optimization in 2D aerodynamics using Genetic Algorithms on parallel computers

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Publisher Summary This chapter presents two Shape Optimization problems for two dimensional airfoil designs. The first one is a reconstruction problem for an airfoil when the velocity of the flow is known on the surface of airfoil. The second problem is to minimize the shock drag of an airfoil at transonic regime. The flow is modeled by the full potential equations. The discretization of the state equation is done using the finite element method and the resulting non-linear system of equations is solved by using a multi-grid method. The non-linear minimization process corresponding to the shape optimization problems are solved by a parallel implementation of a genetic algorithm (GA). Some numerical experiments are computed on an IBM SP2 parallel computer. In these numerical examples the sequential quadratic programming (SQP) was more accurate and efficient since the problems were quite simple and well tailor made. The chapter provides a comparison of the results from the experiments with those obtained using a gradient based minimization method. It concludes that the designs obtained using the GAs are close to the optimal designs.