A continuous adjoint formulation is used to determine optimal airfoil configurations between Re = 10; 000
and 20; 000. An approach derived from concepts of robust design is employed for this purpose. A finite element
method based on streamline-upwind Petrov/Galerkin (SUPG) and pressure stabilized Petrov/Galerkin
(PSPG) stabilizations is used to solve both the flow and adjoint equations. The airfoil is parametrized via
a Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS) curve. L-BFGS algorithm is used as the optimizer in the
present study.
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