Quantification of airfoil aerodynamic uncertainty due to pressure-sensitive paint thickness

In this paper, uncertainty quantification is used to investigate the propagation of the uncertainty of the pressure-sensitive paint (PSP) thickness distribution to the uncertainty of aerodynamic force measured. Specifically, airfoil surface pressure coefficient (Cp) and aerodynamic lift coefficient (Cl) of a natural laminar flow wing are analyzed with uncertain PSP thickness distribution. The airfoil with PSP applied is parameterized by using a novel parameterization method based on radial basis function interpolation. As a characteristic of wing aerodynamic performance, Cl is determined by surface pressure distribution, which can be affected by uncertainties of PSP binder thickness. A kriging response surface method has been used to develop a surrogate model to represent the Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes solution of the flow around the airfoil with PSP. This enables the use of Monte Carlo simulations to obtain stochastic output, including the probability of the occurrence of significantly inaccurate output values affected by the inputs subjecting to Gaussian distributions. An error margin and associated probability for its occurrence are recommended to account for uncertainties for the aerodynamic force occurring in the PSP measurement.