Advanced Aerodynamic Optimization System for Turbomachinery

Abstract

To further improve the efficiency of turbomachinery, an advanced aerodynamic optimization system has been developed for the turbomachinery blade optimization design. The system includes parametric modeling, evaluation system, and optimization strategy modules. The nonuniform rational B-spline technique is successfully used for parametric modeling of different blade shapes. An in-house viscous flow code, which combines the lower-upper symmetric-Gauss-Seidel Gaussian elimination (LU-SGS-GE) implicit scheme and the modified fourth-order monotone upstream-centered schemes for conservation laws total variation diminishing (MUSCL TVD) scheme, has been developed for flow field evaluation, which can be replaced by other computational fluid dynamics codes. The optimization strategy is defined by different cases in the system. Parallel optimization technique was used to accelerate the optimization processes. Three test cases were optimized to improve the efficiency by using the system. These cases are the annular turbine cascades with a subsonic turbine blade, a transonic turbine blade, and a subsonic turbine stage. Reasonably high efficiency and performance were confirmed by comparing the analytical results with those of the previous ones. The advanced aerodynamic optimization system can be an efficient and robust design tool to achieve good blade optimization designs in a reasonable time.