Effect of variogram types on surrogate model based optimisation of aircraft wing shapes

Abstract Engineering design problems always require enormous amount of real-time experiments and computational simulations in order to assess and ensure the design objectives of the problems subject to various constraints. In most of the cases, the computational resources and time required per simulation are large. In certain cases like sensitivity analysis, design optimisation etc. where thousands and millions of simulations have to be carried out, it leads to have a life time of difficulty for designers. Nowadays approximation models, otherwise called as Surrogate Models (SM), are more widely employed in order to reduce the requirement of computational resources and time in analysing various engineering systems. Various approaches such as Kriging, Neural Networks, Polynomials, Gaussian processes etc. are used to construct the approximation models. The primary intention of this work is to employ the k-fold cross validation approach to study and evaluate the influence of various theoretical variogram models on the accuracy of the surrogate model construction. Ordinary Kriging and Design of Experiments (DOE) approaches are used to construct the surrogate models by approximating panel and viscous solution algorithms which are primarily used to solve the flow around airfoils and aircraft wings. The method of coupling the surrogate models with a suitable optimisation scheme to carryout an aerodynamic design optimisation process for aircraft wings is also discussed.