Abstract:
The HRADesign is a general-purpose rotor airfoil aerodynamic design and evaluation software platform. The main purpose of developing this platform is to provide an universal, efficient, high-fidelity, and robust design optimization framework for designing high-performance rotor airfoils of advanced helicopters. Rotor airfoil design, which is a multi-point, multi-objective, and strong-constrained process, is one of the core techniques of helicopter rotor aerodynamic design. According to the characteristics of rotor airfoil design, the HRADesign has developed multi-objective evolutionary algorithms, a PCA multi-objective dimensionality reduction technique, an airfoil parameterization based CST method, Kriging surrogate models, high-fidelity CFD analysis tools and so on, and has also constructed a multi-objectives optimization process based on evolutionary algorithms. By introducing the platform architecture, the main functional modules, and the multi-objective optimization process in detail, the flexibility of the system architecture design and the completeness of the functional modules are demonstrated. At last, system functions had been verified through three examples including a ADODG benchmark case, a conventional multi-objective rotor-airfoil optimization, and an optimization test considering multi-objective dimensionality reduction. The results show that the overall performance of the optimized rotor airfoil is significantly improved under the constraints, which verifies the effectiveness and reliability of the optimization system.