Unsteady Airfoil Design Optimization with Application to Dynamic Stall

The proposed work will develop the RObust unsteady aerodynaMic shapE Optimization (ROMEO) Tool specialized for design and optimization of airfoil shapes that alleviate adverse dynamic stall characteristics resulting from unsteady motion in viscous turbulent flow. The strategy is to use a high fidelity physics based Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code for dynamic stall simulation and to use a nonlinear optimization scheme that guarantees robustness of the computed airfoil shapes to various error sources and uncertainties, such as un-modeled dynamics, manufacturing error and operating conditions variations. In addition, the tool will include the capability of a computationally efficient surrogate optimization design model. This capability will expedite initial trade-off studies for various airfoil shapes and operating conditions before finalizing the airfoil design with the high fidelity CFD-based model. Phase I effort will focus on developing a nonlinear optimization algorithm and strategy that alleviates adverse characteristics of unsteady/viscous/turbulent flow in a favorable way while maintaining desired performance. The design optimization will be further enhanced in Phase II with increased model fidelity and an uncertainty quantification model as a part of nonlinear optimization algorithm. The surrogate optimization design model will also be fully developed as a part of the Phase II effort.