Aerodynamic Wing Optimization via Evolutionary Algorithms Based on Structured Coding

Abstract Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) based on structured coding have been proposed for aerodynamic optimization of wing design. Fractional factorial design is used to investigate interactions of the design variables to determine the appropriate coding structure for EAs in advance. The present EAs is applied to wing design problems where the wing shape is modeled using the parameter set for the extended Joukowski airfoils and the PERSEC airfoils. Aerodynamic optimizations of a transonic wing demonstrated that the structured coding for EAs is a promising approach to find a global optimum in real-world applications. The design results also confirm that the PERSEC is an efficient approach for transonic wing shape parameterization.