The continuous adjoint approach in aerodynamic shape optimization

Detailed numerical shape optimization will play a strategic role for future aircraft design. It offers the possibility of designing or improving aircraft components with respect to a pre-specified figure of merit subject to geometrical and physical constraints. However, the extremely high computational expense of straightforward methodologies currently in use prohibits the application of numerical optimization for industry relevant problems. Optimization methods based on the calculation of the derivatives of the cost function with respect to the design variables suffer from the high computational costs if many design variables are used. However, these gradients can be efficiently obtained by solution of the continuous adjoint flow equations.