Aerospace Engineering Commons^™

Airfoil Design Under Uncertainty Using Non-Intrusive Polynomial Chaos Theory And Utility Functions, Xiaosong Du, Leifur Leifsson, Slawomir Koziel, Adrian Bekasiewicz

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Fast and accurate airfoil design under uncertainty using non-intrusive polynomial chaos (NIPC) expansions and utility functions is proposed. The NIPC expansions provide a means to efficiently and accurately compute statistical information for a given set of input variables with associated probability distribution. Utility functions provide a way to rigorously formulate the design problem. In this work, these two methods are integrated for the design of airfoil shapes under uncertainty. The proposed approach is illustrated on a numerical example of lift-constrained airfoil drag minimization in transonic viscous flow using the Mach number as an uncertain variable. The results show that compared …