Automatic Shape Design and Optimization of Missiles Based on Hex Mesh Generation and CFD Simulation

Modern aircraft development increasingly requires intelligent shape design capabilities to satisfy high-performance demands. The rapid and automatic optimization technology for missile shape, as one of the critical technologies in the modern aircraft development, has attracted wide attention. Computational fluid dynamics-based (CFD-based) optimization algorithms are considered as effective technologies and widely used, while requiring multiple iterations of numerical simulations resulting in significant time cost. To overcome the problem, we introduce structured hex mesh to speed up the process. Our algorithm can be divided into four parts. First, extract a set of parameters to control the missile shape. Second, construct a structured hex mesh for the external flow field according to the current missile shape. Third, mesh deformation algorithms are proposed to adapt to the missile shape changes. Fourth, optimize the missile shape control parameters based on the CFD simulation results. The critical technology is to construct an external flow field mesh. We propose a direct construction method to quickly generate structured hex meshes, which can also adapt to the different missile shapes. We improve the Laplace optimization method for geometry optimization, which is indispensable in the boundary layer mesh construction. We also propose a mesh deformation method, which introduces hex mesh topology optimization. The proposed algorithm has significant advantages in speed of mesh generation and numerical simulation and it is fully automatic, users do not need to adjust mesh or parameters manually. The experiment results demonstrate the efficiency and efficacy of our mesh generation and shape design algorithm.