Structure modal optimization of a strapdown inertial navigation system for an electric helicopter using an adaptive surrogate model

The purpose of this research is to prove the eventuality of using a novel adaptive surrogate model for optimization problems. The adaptive surrogate model is based on iteration sampling and extended radial basis function (ERBF). This method improves the precision by a means that new sample points is placed in the blank area and all the sample points is uniformly distributed in the design region. The precision of the surrogate model is checked using standard error measure to determine whether updating the surrogate model or not. Since the prediction of modal frequencies require structure modal simulations. In order to decrease the number of computer simulations, a Multi-Island GA approach is combined with the adaptive surrogate model to find the optimum modal frequencies of a strapdown inertial navigation system for electric helicopters. The strapdown inertial navigation system is comprised of damping material, counterweight material and inertial navigation sensor. This is a multi-objective functions optimization problem since the modal frequencies are considered from mode 1 to mode 6 in this paper. Several weights of multi-objective functions are utilized to research the modal frequencies. The whole number of 15 sampling points is picked to build the primary surrogate model using Latin hypercube sampling (LHS). The results of adaptive surrogate model show that two new sampling points are needed to reform the precision of the surrogate model under the condition of 2 % confidence bounds. The structure modal optimization results show that the choice of the weights for the multi-objective functions has a major effect on the final optimum modal frequencies. Time- and frequency-domain analysis indicated that the optimum modal frequencies are far away from the excitation frequencies to avoid strapdown inertial navigation system resonance as far as possible.