Ongoing activities in shape optimization within the German project MEGADESIGN

Aerospace industry is increasingly relying on advanced numerical flow simulation tools in the early aircraft design phase. Today's flow solvers based on the solution of the compressible Euler and Navier-Stokes equations are able to predict aerodynamic behaviour of aircraft components under different flow conditions quite well. Due to the high computational expense required for flow simulations around realistic 3D configurations, in industry computational fluid dynamics tools are rather used for analysis and assessment of given geometries than for shape design and optimization. However, within the next few years numerical shape optimization will play a strategic role fur future aircraft design. It offers the possibility of designing or improving aircraft components with respect to a pre-specified figure of merit subject to geometrical and physical constraints. Recently, large research effort is devoted to develop efficient optimization strategies for industrial aerodynamic aircraft design. Consequently, the German project MEGADESIGN was initiated, where several partners from German industries, universities and research institutions are involved. The duration of the MEGADESIGN project will be from September 2003 to August 2007. The presentation will outline the planned activities within MEGADESIGN, the status at begin of the project and what was already achieved within the early project phase up to now. There are many ingredients to establish an efficient and flexible numerical optimization capability. These include suitable techniques for geometry parametrization, meshing and mesh movement methods, efficient and accurate flow solvers as well as a flexible tool-set of containing both deterministic and stochastic based optimizers. One key activity is the derivation and implementation of a continuous adjoint approach for the DLR flow simulation software MEGAFLOW based on the solution of the (adjoint) Euler and Navier-Stokes equations. Its potential of efficient aerodynamic shape design in compressible flow will be demonstrated by several applications