Conformal Free Form Deformation for the Optimisation of Complex Geometries

The paper presents an approach for the deformation of complex geometries by means of Free Form Deformation (FFD). Usually, FFD is dealing with rectangular boxes including the objects to be deformed. Here an intermediate space mapping is adopted in order to include objects inside arbitrarily shaped boxes. The example of the optimisation of a propeller blade, parameterised by Conformal FFD (CFFD) is giving a practical example of the applicability of this technique to the parametric design and optimisation of complex geometries.