Comparison of a Response Surface Method and Artificial Neural Network in Predicting the Aerodynamic Performance of a Wind Turbine Airfoil and Its Optimization

To find the optimal design for an engineering object, thousands of (or even more) simulations should be implemented to obtain the outcome data for the variously designed objects. However, repeating simulations this many times is impossible because a typical simulation is a computationally expensive task. Instead of conducting all the required simulations, a more efficient way is predicting the outcome from the approximation model, called the surrogate model. The response surface method (RSM) with polynomials and artificial neural network (ANN) are the most prominent methods in constructing a surrogate model in the engineering fields. In this study, the prediction accuracy of the surrogate models computed by using an RSM and ANN is compared with several datasets showing different complexities. This comparison is investigated by constructing the surrogate models in predicting aerodynamic performance of a wind turbine airfoil. In the current paper, it is verified that the prediction accuracy of the ANN-computed surrogate model is higher than the RSM-computed one when the datasets have a high level of complexity, but the opposite phenomenon is observed if the datasets have a low level of complexity. When the surrogate models with different accuracies are used to enhance the performance of a wind turbine airfoil, the surrogate model with a high level of accuracy produces the optimal design, showing a high performance improvement. The current study is expected to give guidance on how to properly choose between an RSM and ANN to construct a highly accurate surrogate model that can help in finding a design with a high performance improvement during the optimization process.