Fundamental Study on Aerodynamic-Driven Topology Optimization of Compliant Morphing Airfoil Using Panel Method

This study aims to develop an optimal design method that simultaneously explores the optimal morphing shape and the internal structural configuration without setting a predefined target shape to obtain a morphing airfoil structure that is superior in terms of both aerodynamic and structural performances. A panel method is adopted to evaluate the aerodynamic performance, which provides a good estimate of the aerodynamic characteristics of the airfoil profile, with low computational cost and low fidelity. The structure is modeled by finite element method, and the structural configuration that improves the aerodynamic performance evaluated by the panel method is obtained by the topology optimization. Additionally, the sensitivity, which is a guideline for the optimum design search to improve the aerodynamic performance, is derived to efficiently perform the optimization. In this paper, the proposed method is applied to the stiffness maximization problem of an airfoil internal structure subjected to aerodynamic loading as a benchmark problem. Through this numerical example, the validity of the proposed method is discussed by investigating the structural performance of the obtained optimized structural configurations under different aerodynamic loads.