One of the main concerns in Engineering nowadays is the development of aircrafts of low consumption and high performance. For this purpose, airfoils are studied and designed to have an elevated lift coefficient and a ...One of the main concerns in Engineering nowadays is the development of aircrafts of low consumption and high performance. For this purpose, airfoils are studied and designed to have an elevated lift coefficient and a low drag coefficient, thus generating a highly efficient airfoil. The higher the efficiency value is, the lower the aircraft fuel consumption will be; thus improving its performance. In this sense, this work aims to develop a tool for airfoil creation from some desired characteristics, such as the lift and drag coefficients and maximum efficiency rate, using an algorithm based on an ANN （artificial neural network）. In order to do so, a database of aerodynamic characteristics with a total of 300 airfoils was initially collected from the XFoil software. Then, through a routine implemented in the MATLAB software, network architectures of one, two, three and four modules were trained, using the back propagation algorithm and momentum. The cross-validation technique was applied to analyze the results, evaluating which network possesses the lowest value in RMS （root-mean-square） error. In this case, the best result obtained was from the two-module architecture with two hidden neuron layers. The airfoils developed by this network, in the regions with the lowest RMS, were compared to the same airfoils imported to XFoil. The presented work offers as a contribution, in relation to other works involving ANN applied to fluid mechanics, the development of airfoils from their aerodynamic characteristics.展开更多
文摘One of the main concerns in Engineering nowadays is the development of aircrafts of low consumption and high performance. For this purpose, airfoils are studied and designed to have an elevated lift coefficient and a low drag coefficient, thus generating a highly efficient airfoil. The higher the efficiency value is, the lower the aircraft fuel consumption will be; thus improving its performance. In this sense, this work aims to develop a tool for airfoil creation from some desired characteristics, such as the lift and drag coefficients and maximum efficiency rate, using an algorithm based on an ANN （artificial neural network）. In order to do so, a database of aerodynamic characteristics with a total of 300 airfoils was initially collected from the XFoil software. Then, through a routine implemented in the MATLAB software, network architectures of one, two, three and four modules were trained, using the back propagation algorithm and momentum. The cross-validation technique was applied to analyze the results, evaluating which network possesses the lowest value in RMS （root-mean-square） error. In this case, the best result obtained was from the two-module architecture with two hidden neuron layers. The airfoils developed by this network, in the regions with the lowest RMS, were compared to the same airfoils imported to XFoil. The presented work offers as a contribution, in relation to other works involving ANN applied to fluid mechanics, the development of airfoils from their aerodynamic characteristics.
