Study on aerodynamic design optimization of turbomachinery blades

Abstract

This paper describes the study on aerodynamics design optimization of turbomachinery blading developed by the authors at the Institute of Engineering Thermophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, during the recent few years. The present paper describes the aspects mainly on how to use a rapid approach of profiling a 3D blading and of grid generation for computation, a fast and accurate viscous computation method and an appropriate optimization methodology including a blade parameterization algorithm to optimize turbomachinery blading aerodynamically. Any blade configuration can be expressed by three curves, they are the camber lines, the thickness distributions and the radial stacking line, and then the blade geometry can be easily parameterized by a number of parameters with three polynomials. A gradient-based parameterization analytical method and a response surface method were applied herein for blade optimization. It was found that the optimization process provides reliable design for turbomachinery with reasonable computing time.