In transonic region, the cruising efficiency of aircraft is roughly proportional to ML/D. And the large increase in drag is due to the shock phenomena. In many other designs, the design purposes are to decrease the wave drag by reducing the shock strength.
In general, there are two catagories in aerodynamic design methods; the one is inverse design and the other is optimization. In aircraft design the optimization method is preferred for more desirable result because of its easy appliance of constraints, but it is a very time-consumming method. In contrast, the inverse design method is relatively faster than the optimization method, but the required target pressure is usually dependent on designer's experience.
The main topic of this paper is to design the airfoil shape which can minimize wave drag within given aerodynamic and geometric conditions. For this purpose, a fast and efficient design method is suggested using target pressure optimization, in which the target pressure is obtained by the optimization technique and the airfoil shape is designed using the inverse design method.
