Airfoil smoothing using unconditional optimization

Abstract

The paper considers the smoothing of tabulated curves describing airfoils. Smoothing is required to eliminate airfoil contour distortions that occur during the design of the aircraft wing surface. The problem of ensuring a smooth change in the curvature of the smoothed contour is presented as a problem of minimizing the quadratic function of many variables. To minimize the objective quadratic function, the gradient descent method with a constant step was used. According to the developed technique, with the help of a computer program, the smoothing of the airfoil was carried out. As a result, a rather smooth diagram of the profile curvature was obtained, which confirmed the effectiveness of the developed smoothing technique.