Robust design of compressor fan blades against erosion

This paper is concerned with robust aerodynamic design of compressor blades against erosion. The proposed approach combines a multiobjective genetic algorithm with geometry modeling methods, high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics, and surrogate models to arrive at robust designs on a limited computational budget. The multiobjective formulation used here allows explicit trade-off between the mean and variance of the performance to be carried out. Detailed numerical studies are presented for robust geometric design of a typical compressor fan blade section to illustrate the proposed methodology. The performance of a selected robust optimal solution on the Pareto front is compared to a deterministic optimal solution to demonstrate that significant improvements in the mean shift and variance can be achieved.