Multifidelity Rotor Optimization Using A Modern Computation Aeromechanics Toolchain

Abstract

A multifidelity surrogate optimization procedure is demonstrated for aerodynamic design of a rotor. The rotorcraft comprehensive analysis CAMRADII is used as a lower fidelity, fast running solution. Higher fidelity solutions are calculated using the CFD solver HELIOS. Best practices in meshing and solution settings which balance overall accuracy with computational efficiency for the higher fidelity method are explored. The higher fidelity solution takes approximately 6 orders of magnitude more computational resources to complete. Through successive epochs of optimization and surrogate updating it is shown that the process can reach similar optimal values as optimization on a more densely sampled multifidelity surrogate, addressing the curse of dimensionality concern that often arises in optimization and lower the overall computational cost.