Robust airfoil optimization of human-powered aircraft against manufacturing variations


Abstract

Robust design optimizations of an airfoil are conducted to increase the aerodynamic performance and to reduce the performance deterioration due to the manufacturing variations of a human-powered aircraft. Randomly-generated perturbed designs are evaluated for the robustness index. Maximum performance difference is used for robustness definition to prevent the worst performance deterioration. The approach can design less-sensitive airfoil against the manufacturing variations while improving the performance compared to initial airfoil. In addition, the essential parameter to control performance and robustness is discussed.