Design exploration of airfoil geometry for martian airplane

To design airfoils for novel airplanes, new knowledge of aerodynamics is required. Modified Parametric SECtion (modified PARSEC) airfoil representation is one of the promising methods for automated airfoil/wing design. In this paper, this method is applied to airfoil design exploration by means of a Kriging model based genetic algorithm (GA) to obtain an optimal airfoil for consideration in the development of a Martian airplane. In this study, an airfoil that can obtain a sufficient glide ratio is considered. The objective function is to maximize the maximum lift-to-drag ratio. To extract the knowledge from solutions, the self-organizing map map (SOM) is also applied. According to the exploration result, several solutions which carry out high aerodynamic performances could be found out. In addition, design knowledges on the low Reynolds number airfoil could be extracted efficiently by SOM. SOM's results suggest that the airfoil with and higher camber at the trailing edge is more suitable for a Martian airplane. © 2015 The Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan.