Abstract “SHAPING UP: Mesh morphing reduces the time required to optimize an aircraft wing.”

Most business aircraft manufacturers use computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and wind tunnel testing to evaluate wing designs one iteration at a time.

However, with this method, optimizing a design typically runs into many months — time that leading manufacturers try to reduce.

To speed up the optimization process, Piaggio Aero Industries, S.p.A., teamed with researchers at the University of Rome Tor Vergata to validate a new design optimization method that generates a single mesh as a starting point and morphs it to any new geometry studied.

The morpher tool RBF Morph allows engineers to change the locations of nodes in the computational mesh to alter wing shape, then it matches the surrounding surface and volume mesh to the new shape.

Researchers applied ANSYS DesignXplorer to drive the morpher to map out the complete design space, identify the optimal design and validate its robustness in just a few weeks.