Aerodynamic shape design of wings using an inverse problem approach

Describes a computational method for aerodynamic shape design which is one of the major applications of high-performance computing. The design starts from a base-line shape and makes geometrical corrections iteratively until the corrected shape realizes a prescribed pressure distribution. The correction value is obtained by flow simulation and inverse problem solving. In this research, an inverse problem solver has been newly developed for the aerodynamic shape design of multiple wing systems. The solver takes the mutual effect among the wings into consideration and simultaneously provides the section shape of each wing. For flow simulation, Navier-Stokes equations are solved on a vector-parallel machine. Design results show that the method using the inverse problem solver and the high-performance simulation is promising for performing complicated aircraft design within a realistic time period