Abstract
The conventional method of optimizing the aerodynamic performance of an airfoil heavily depends on the confines of the design space. The design variables create a non-normalized space that is fragmented into several different clusters of airfoils. An approach that is data-driven and deforms airfoils over a Grassmannian submanifold is utilized in the work that is being presented here. The affine deformation, which includes camber and thickness, can be uncoupled from the method that is currently in use, and the operations that are performed on the airfoil shape can be made smooth enough to prevent unreasonable shapes from being produced. The CST method is also a part of the current study so that a comparison can be made between the two. A new method to describe the airfoil geometries over the Grassmannian space was generated using a dataset that contained 7007 different shapes of airfoils. These two methods are used to parameterize the subsonic (NACA0012) and transonic (RAE2822) airfoils, and the new method cuts the number of design variables from twelve to six, resulting in a reduction in overall complexity. The findings demonstrate that the new method maintains a high degree of consistency regardless of the flow conditions.