An improved adaptive sampling and experiment design method for aerodynamic optimization

Abstract Experiment design method is a key to construct a highly reliable surrogate model for numerical optimization in large-scale project. Within the method, the experimental design criterion directly affects the accuracy of the surrogate model and the optimization efficient. According to the shortcomings of the traditional experimental design, an improved adaptive sampling method is proposed in this paper. The surrogate model is firstly constructed by basic sparse samples. Then the supplementary sampling position is detected according to the specified criteria, which introduces the energy function and curvature sampling criteria based on radial basis function (RBF) network. Sampling detection criteria considers both the uniformity of sample distribution and the description of hypersurface curvature so as to significantly improve the prediction accuracy of the surrogate model with much less samples. For the surrogate model constructed with sparse samples, the sample uniformity is an important factor to the interpolation accuracy in the initial stage of adaptive sampling and surrogate model training. Along with the improvement of uniformity, the curvature description of objective function surface gradually becomes more important. In consideration of these issues, crowdness enhance function and root mean square error (RMSE) feedback function are introduced in C criterion expression. Thus, a new sampling method called RMSE and crowdness enhance (RCE) adaptive sampling is established. The validity of RCE adaptive sampling method is studied through typical test function firstly and then the airfoil/wing aerodynamic optimization design problem, which has high-dimensional design space. The results show that RCE adaptive sampling method not only reduces the requirement for the number of samples, but also effectively improves the prediction accuracy of the surrogate model, which has a broad prospects for applications.