A simple yet efficient method for shape optimization of aircraft wings is presented. Our approach replaces the direct optimization of an expensive high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) wing model by an iterative procedure consisting of updating and re-optimization of a fast surrogate model. The surrogate is constructed using low-fidelity aerodynamic models and an output space mapping correction. For the sake of computational efficiency, the surrogate is optimized using auxiliary response surface models. As a result, an improved design of the wing can be obtained at a very low cost corresponding to a few evaluations of the high-fidelity CFD wing model, even though no sensitivity information is used. Our technique is demonstrated using a simple example of a rectangular unswept wing. In this example, the high-fidelity CFD wing model is a steady-state Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes analysis with the Spalart-Allmaras turbulence model, whereas the low-fidelity aerodynamic model is based on two-dimensional CFD airfoil simulations.
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