Optimum layout of vortex generators for upper surface of wing using efficient global optimization

Abstract

The “buffet” which is the shock wave vibration on the wing at transonic speed has influence to the aerodynamic performance of the civil transport. It is significant because the wing cannot maintain its aerodynamic performance and it is also led to the stall. Therefore, several researches on the suppression of the buffet are carried out. A Vortex Generator (VG) is one of the way which can improve to the transonic buffet. It is simple device and widely applied to the commercial airplane. Conventionally, VGs are installed along the wing span. However, they increase the friction and the instruction drag. Thus, the number of VGs should not be beyond the minimum necessary. Another problem is that it is still expensive for the computational fluid dynamics to simulate the small size vortex accurately. Therefore, the optimization procedure of the VGs installation is developed with directly combining the wind tunnel evaluation result. To reduce the number of experimentations, the surrogate model based GA exploration is employed. The design objective is to maintain the linearity of the variation lift with changing angle of attack (lift curve), because the stall is appeared if the curvature of the lift curves become smaller. Eight initial designs are evaluated and five design samples are acquired. As this result, optimum samples can be explored with reducing the number of the experiment. Several samples successfully prevent the stall without increasing the drag. In addition, the design knowledge can be obtained regarding the optimum VG’s layout by visualization.

Keywords

• transonic wing
• buffet
• vortex generator
• efficient optimum design
• genetic algorithm
• kriging model