Application of Response Surface Method and Genetic Algorithm in the Design of High-Efficiency Prototype Vehicle

Abstract

Breakthroughs in aerodynamic optimization have made it possible to develop efficient modes of transport with lesser exploitation of valuable resources. This makes it crucial for technical professionals such as engineers and scientists to understand the methodologies behind carrying out such optimizations. A common approach towards improving the aerodynamic properties of a vehicle is to alter its physical shape, which has concurrently been a very strenuous process given the time consumed to remodel the vehicle for each simulation process. This research aims to tackle this problem by using intelligent techniques to automate the step-by-step process of remodeling the car and arriving at a final optimized solution with a significantly lower drag coefficient, a quantity used to measure the amount of drag force acting on a vehicle. This is achieved by assigning particular parameters to ensure guided improvement of the airfoil in a process known as parametrization, followed by implementing a response surface methodology primarily to circumvent the strenuous task of performing a large number of CFD simulations by employing surrogate models to generate a response surface between selected independent variables. Further, evolutionary algorithms such as Genetic Algorithm have gained momentum in the optimization studies carried out during product design by selecting the optimum parameters from the available design spaces on the basis of natural evolution. The proposed method of optimization has been successfully implemented on a prototype vehicle with an improvement of 26.6% and 51.1% in the drag coefficient and drag area respectively.