Reformulation of a Three-Dimensional Inverse Design Method for Application in a High-Fidelity CFD Environment

Abstract

Three-dimensional inverse design has been shown to be a reliable and powerful tool for facilitating the refinement of blading design and improving stage matching, thereby providing increased aero-design quality and productivity in difficult design situations. However, inverse design has not been incorporated widely into design systems. Reasons for this may be that many inverse techniques are limited to two dimensional problems, or are highly integrated with a specific flow solver and therefore difficult to integrate with proprietary or commercial CFD methods. A reformulation of a three-dimensional inverse design method is presented here that overcomes these limitations. The new method is fully consistent with viscous flow modeling. Camber modification is performed using a blade velocity derived from the difference between prescribed and actual pressure loading. The new inverse method completely eliminates differences between analysis and inverse calculations. Moreover, the reformulation effectively decouples the inverse method from the flow solver. This makes it possible to supplement any CFD-code with the developed inverse design module, provided an interface can be created between the solver and the inverse module through which to pass information on flow and mesh. This makes inverse design available to most design offices.