Investigation of various parametric geometry representation methods for airfoils

This paper presents the investigation of typical parametric geometry representation methods for airfoils, namely, PARSEC method, orthogonal basis function method and CST method. The investigation assesses the fitting accuracy of these parametric methods for various airfoils including the symmetric airfoil, cambered airfoil and supercritical airfoil. The design variables of these parametric methods are solved by the methods of least squares fit. The fitting results show that the fitting accuracy of CST method is better than other parametric methods for airfoil. The aerodynamics analysis models of these typical parametric geometry representation methods for airfoil are constructed. The pressure distributions calculated for different parametric methods are compared with the corresponding experimental pressure distributions for the actual airfoil geometry.