Optimal Design of Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow Using Adjoint Sensitivity Analysis

Abstract

An optimization system based on adjoint sensitivity analysis has been developed for heat transfer and fluid flow design, the objective of which is, for example, the maximization of local temperature or to achieve the target temperature distributions in specific regions by controlling the flow and thermal boundary conditions as the design parameters. Using the system, the sensitivities on whole boundary can be obtained by a couple of numerical computations of the conventional forward problem and the corresponding adjoint problem. Moreover, by combining with a commercial CFD software as a front end and with the steepest descent method as an optimizer, we show that the flow and thermal boundary conditions can automatically be optimized.