S2 Surface Quasi-3D Aerodynamic design using the continuous adjoint method for multi-stage turbine

The adjoint method eliminates the dependence of the gradient of the objective function with respect to design variables on the flow field making the obtainment of the gradient both accurate and fast. For this reason, the adjoint method has become the focus of attention in recent years. This paper develops a continuous adjoint formulation for through-flow aerodynamic shape design in a multi-stage gas turbine environment based on a S2 surface quasi-3D problem governed by the Euler equations with source terms. Given the general expression of the objective function calculated via a boundary integral, the adjoint equations and their boundary conditions are derived in detail by introducing adjoint variable vectors. As a result, the final expression of the objective function gradient only includes the terms pertinent to those physical shape variations that are calculated by metric variations. The adjoint system is solved numerically by a finite-difference method with explicit Euler time-marching scheme and a Jameson spatial scheme which employs first and third order dissipative flux. Integrating the blade stagger angles and passage perturbation parameterization with the simple steepest decent method, a gradient-based aerodynamic shape design system is constructed. Finally, the application of the adjoint method is validated through a 5-stage turbine blade and passage optimization with an objective function of entropy generation. The result demonstrates that the gradient-based system can be used for turbine aerodynamic design.