Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency Supersonic Transport Team, Aviation Program Group
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency Supersonic Transport Team, Aviation Program Group
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency Information Systems Department
This paper describes an optimization design technology and some applications of CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics)-based aerodynamic shape optimization conducted in JAXA's supersonic research program. To improve aerodynamic performance of a supersonic transport, an aerodynamic design tool, which combines a three-dimensional Euler CFD code with a gradient-based optimization technique, is developed. In order to reduce computational cost, a continuous adjoint sensitivity analysis is used to calculate the gradients of an objective function with respect to design variables in each design cycle. The developed shape optimization tool is validated for some design problems. It is shown that this tool can greatly reduce the computation time in aerodynamic shape design to maximize or minimize the objective function.