Global Aerodynamic Design Optimization via Primal-Dual Aggregation Method

Abstract: Global aerodynamic design optimization using Euler or Navier-Stokes equations requires very reliable surrogate modeling techniques since the computational effort for the underlying flow simulations is usually high. In general, for such problems, the number of samples that can be generated to train the surrogate models is very limited due to restricted computational resources. On the other hand, recent developments in adjoint methods enable nowadays evaluation of gradient information at a reasonable computational cost for a wide variety of engineering problems. Therefore, a much richer data set can be collected using an adjoint solver in a Design of Experiment framework. In the present work, we present a novel aggregation method, which enables the state of the art surrogate models to incorporate extra gradient information without causing overfitting problems. Therefore, accurate surrogate models with relatively large number of design parameters can be trained from a small set of samples. We also present results two well known benchmark design optimization problems showing efficiency and robustness of the new method.