Multipoint aerodynamic design of wing-body configurations for minimum drag

A CFD-driven robust and accurate method for constrained aerodynamic design of 3-D isolated wings, previously developed by the authors, is extended to multipoint optimization of wing-body aircraft configurations. In this method, the total drag is minimized at fixed lift subject to numerous geometrical and aerodynamical constraints. The method is driven by genetic algorithms and full Navier-Stokes computations supported by massive multilevel parallelization. The applications include a series of single- and multipoint aerodynamic designs for a transport-type aircraft configuration (a NASA test case ARA M-100). For the considered class of shape optimizations, significant drag reduction in on- and off-design conditions has been achieved.