Abstract: Airfoil design is a crucial issue of aerodynamic research, the parameterization of airfoil will affect the airfoil optimization design. In order to reduce the number of variables in the airfoil optimization, eliminate the unfairness phenomenon, preserve the C2 continuity condition, and control the geometric characteristics of the airfoil in the optimization process, in this paper, we present an improved method for airfoil parameterization by B-spline. The method represents airfoil by a cubic non-uniform B-spline curve. Fitting of airfoil data by B-spline curve is mainly by least square method and the normal constraints. And the final result is obtained by iteration. Experiments show that the proposed method can be well fitted to the typical airfoil data, the resulting curve is fair and C2 continuity, and has few parameters of airfoil function compared with the classical airfoil parametric methods.

Key words: airfoil, B-spline curves, airfoil parameterization, airfoil optimization