An inverse code based on a residual-correction method for wing design

Abstract

A fast, efficient and reliable code for wing design has been developed at INTA coupling a residual-correction method by Bauer, McFadden and Garabedian to an inviscid solver for wing analysis in transonic flow. Smoothing procedures, including Bézier cubic splines, are used to avoid irregularities of the wing surface, as well as the twist distribution. A non-conservative full potential finite differences code is used as the flow solver. The redesign of two wings in transonic flow are presented with promising results. The computing time required to achieve convergence up to a good level of accuracy is less than 1 hour in a Workstation of 300 Mflops. The code is actually a powerful tool for preliminary wing design. Future work will be addressed to the addition of viscous effects and to studies on the optimization of target pressure distributions.