A NON-DIMENSIONAL QUASI-3D BLADE DESIGN APPROACH WITH RESPECT TO AERODYNAMIC CRITERIA

摘要

The competition between aero-engine manufacturers has increased dramatically in the last decades. Saving computational time within the design process, which is equivalent to saving money, is of major importance for the industry. Talking about the aerodynamic compressor blading process, it becomes indispensable to go for new or alternative ways in designing blades in order to fulfill raised performance demands.The focus of this paper, therefore, is to propose a quasi-3D aerodynamic design concept with extended and improved parameterization of the aerofoil in order to support the industrial blading process. A Bezier-surface is selected to parameterize the non-dimensional camber-line angle distribution along the blade chord from leading to trailing edge over the entire blade height in radial direction. Starting from scratch, the geometric blade build-up is completed by superposing the resulting camber-line with a given thickness distribution. For additional increase of design freedom, Bezier-curves are used to radially parameterize blade inlet and outlet angles in their dimensionless form. The chosen parameterization of these distributions guarantees smooth blade shapes and geometry distributions with a minimum of design parameters.For optimization purpose it is essential to get performance information on the entire blade, however, with minimal computational effort. Facing this challenge, aerodynamic blade performance is evaluated by a two-dimensional blade-to-blade flow solver for specific sections on different radial blade heights. In order to speed up the blade design process, the flow calculations are realized by a distributed computing concept on a Linux high-performance cluster. All investigations are carried out for highly loaded controlled diffusion blades which are taken from an existing industrial research application. Since selected criteria such as meanloss at design point conditions and working range for off-design flow conditions represent contradicting design goals, the blade design problem is solved by means of a multi-objective problem formulation and a stochastic optimization algorithm. As a result Pareto-optimal trade-off solutions between conflicting design goals are shown where the design engineer can choose from according to his specific preferences.