AIRFOIL DESIGN OPTIMIZATION USING MULTI FIDELITY AT LOW REYNOLDS NUMBER FOR FIXED WING UAV

A methodology is given to choose an airfoil for a fixed wing UAV, and evaluate based on the mission constraints, and to efficiently optimize the airfoil by using multi-fidelity software such as XFLR5 and ANSYS FLUENT. The analysis solvers are validated for the wind tunnel test data of E387 and CAL2463m airfoil. Then, twenty low speed airfoils for conventional fixed wing UAV are constructed by using the multi-fidelity solvers. The weighting score method is used to select the appropriate airfoil for the given design requirements. The selected airfoil is used as a baseline for the inverse airfoil design optimization step to refine and obtain the optimal airfoil configuration. The effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method is demonstrated by applying to the design of a conventional wing UAV airfoil.