With the constant pressure on the aircraft industry to reduce its environmental impact, morphing wing among other innovative concepts is envisioned
to have a significant contribution in improving the aerodynamic performance
and extending the mission capabilities of the next generation of aircraft. In the
present study, the aerodynamic characteristics of two morphing concepts are
investigated. Firstly morphing camber optimization using FishBAC concept
to reduce the drag coefficient of NACA 0012 through two-level optimization
task: upper level which optimizes the baseline design thickness distribution
whereas lower level finds the optimum morphing using surrogate-based bilevel
optimization framework which was developed to overcome the high computational cost associated with such hierarchical structure optimization problems.
The developed framework used Kriging to model the lower level optimal value
function as a function of upper level variables in house algorithm KADAL
(Kriging for Analysis, Design Optimization, and Exploration) while COBRA
(Constrained Optimization by Radial Basis Function Interpolation) used as
lower level optimizer. Secondly, morphing thickness optimization was carried
out to delay laminar flow transition over the upper surface of MS(1)-031 airfoil
through-thickness modifications with genetic algorithm (GA) as an optimizer.
The results presented in this thesis showed the effectiveness of these morphing concepts in drag reduction, transitions delay, and improved aerodynamic
efficiency.