Aerodynamic shape optimization of a 3D wing via volumetric B-Splines

This paper shows a gradient-based aerodynamic shape optimization of a threedimensional wing using volumetric B-Splines. The wing is enclosed in a volumetric parallelepiped, commonly referred as control box, which can be seen as a rubber box that deforms the enclosed space. The deformation of the wing is provided by the manipulation of the control points, where the gradients are calculated using the continuous adjoint solution. This technique can be applied to arbitrary three dimensional complex designs and provides some advantages over other traditional geometry parameterization methods, such as deformation locality and the ability to handle some geometric constraints