An investigation of the potential for enhancing the computational turbomachinery design cycle using surrogate models and high performance parallelisation

This paper describes the deployment of supplementary tools to the modem industrial aerodynamic design cycle in the context of multi-objective optimisation. The benefits arising through the use of these tools are demonstrated through a single-row stator compressor test case, minimising two of the flow characteristics most critical to the efficiency of the turbomachine: blockage and entropy generation rate. The automatic integrated design system used, MOBOS3D, is equipped with an application-specific optimiser and a RBF surrogate model, in order to decrease the computational cost of the design evaluation process. The meta-model is utilised inside the system and is constantly trained in real time from the current database of the simulated test cases. In addition, a new parallelisation strategy is implemented, which exploits the possibility, of executing simulations on a cluster of clusters, reducing significantly the wall-clock time required for the design optimisation process of real-world applications.