Low-Fidelity Rapid Wing Design Optimization Approach for UAV

Optimizing the wings is crucial in designing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as it provides significant performance, efficiency, and operational capacity advantages. The typical approach to optimizing wing design involves high-fidelity simulations that are computationally costly, which restricts the study of possible design areas. It is crucial for engineers to offer an easy and reliable aerodynamic design and optimization tool to help the emerging aerial vehicle sector. This study proposes a novel approach that combines the speed and simplicity of the 3D panel method with optimization algorithms, such as BOBYQA, enabling quick iterations and improvements in the conceptual and preliminary wing design phase. This practical approach rapidly identifies optimal wing configurations by balancing aerodynamic performance and structural integrity, ensuring that the wings are efficient and structurally sound. This balance significantly reduces development time and costs while ensuring high precision. The efficiency of this methodology is showcased through an optimized UAV wing from a conventional rectangular UAV wing where we validate our low-fidelity (LF) optimized wing results with high-fidelity (HF) CFD results, and it shows very close to HF results, which confirms that the proposed rapid conceptual wing design optimization approach is practical.