Aerodynamic design with physics-based surrogates

Abstract

Details, references and guidelines are given about the adoption of surrogate models and reduced-order models within the aerodynamic shape optimization context. The aerodynamic design problem and its approximated version are introduced and discussed and then, an overview of various surrogate models and surrogate-based optimization methods is given. Subsequently, the concept of model order reduction is recalled, and the performance analysis of reduced-order models based on proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) is discussed. Within this context, some techniques to adaptively and globally improve the accuracy of POD-based surrogates are illustrated. Finally, an aerodynamic shape design problem of a transonic airfoil is used to practically analyze and compare the performances of various surrogate-based op-timization methods.