Turbine Blade Aerodynamic Optimization on Unstructured Grids Using a Continuous Adjoint Method

A gradient based optimization using the continuous adjoint method for inverse design of a turbine blade cascade is presented. The advantage of the adjoint method is that the objective function gradients can be evaluated by solving the adjoint equations with coefficients depending on the flow variables. This method is particularly suitable for aerodynamic design optimization for which the number of design variables is large. Bezier polynomials are used to parameterize suction side of the turbine blade. The numerical convective fluxes of both flow and adjoint equations are computed by using a Roe-type approximate Riemann solver. An approximate linearization is applied to simplify the calculation of the numerical flux of adjoint variables on the faces of computational cell. The problem examined is that of the inverse design of NASA C3X blade that reproduces a given pressure distributions over its surfaces. Adjoint results show a good agreement with those obtained by finite-difference method.