Outer Geometry Optimization of an Air-to-Air Missile

The aim of the paper herein is to develop efficient optimization-based aerodynamic design for short term air-to-air missile outer geometry. Dimensioning of a product can be performed by trial-and-error process conducted by an experienced designer or by the tests until the requirements are verified. When the computer aided design have been introduced in the design and manufacturing processes, the time spent on making designs are significantly reduced. Optimization methods are also involved in the design processes. They have been developed in order to choose best element from initial set of elements with given objective which has minimizing or maximizing function such as maximizing the product efficiency and minimizing the costs. They basically divide into two categories as gradient and genetic algorithms differing from each other to find the best suitable combination. In aviation industry, many studies have been carried out with implementation of surrogate models on analysis and using design of experiments methods within different optimization algorithms. In this study, body and aerofoil dimensions are determined as outer geometry parameters. These parameters are used as the inputs for flight simulation software in order to calculate aerodynamic parameters. Finally, aerodynamic parameters are used for the guidance simulation of the missile. Surrogate models which are statistical methods and simulate the analyses in order to reduce the calculation times are also used in the optimization process. All codes and simulation programs are integrated in ModeFrontier™ software. ModeFrontier™ is also used for performing different optimization methods such as gradient and genetic based algorithms.