• Journal of the Korean Society of Visualization
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.83-90
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• 2023

The shape of an airfoil is a critical factor in determining aerodynamic characteristics such as lift and drag. Aerodynamic properties of an airfoil have a decisive impact on the performance of various engineering applications, including airplane wings and wind turbine blades. Therefore, it is essential to analyze the aerodynamic characteristics of airfoils. Various analytical tools such as experiments, computational fluid dynamics, and Xfoil are used to perform these analyses, but each tool has its limitation. In this study, airfoil parameterization, image recognition, and artificial intelligence are combined to overcome these limitations. Image and coordinate data are collected from the UIUC airfoil database. Airfoil parameterization is performed by recognizing images from image data to build a database for deep learning. Trained model can predict the aerodynamic characteristics not only of airfoil images but also of sketches. The mean absolute error of untrained data is 0.0091.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.38 no.11
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• pp.1049-1059
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• 2010

This paper treats the aerodynamic optimization of the blade planform for helicopters. The blade shapes, which should be determined during the threedimensional aerodynamic configuration design step, are defined and are parameterized using the B$\acute{e}$zier curves. This research focuses on the design approaches generally adopted by industries and or research institutes using their own experiences and know-hows for the parameterization and for the definition of design constraints. The hover figure of merit and the equivalent lift-to-drag ratio for the forward flight are used to define the objective function. The resultant nonlinear programming (NLP) problem is solved using the sequential quadratic programming (SQP) method. The applications show the present method can design the important planform shapes such as the airfoil distribution, twist and chord variations in the efficient manner.