Background and industrial relevance
Mechanical components in for example gas turbines and jet engines are subjected to extreme mechanical and thermal loads. When designing such components it is therefore necessary to simultaneously consider mechanical design criteria such as weight, stiffness, strength, and fatigue; control maximum temperatures and temperature gradients; and to enable efficient internal (cooling media) and external (hot gas) fluid flow. Adding to that, manufacturability and robust performance for a wide range of operating scenarios must also be ensured. This results in a very challenging multi-physics and multi-criteria design optimization problem, and computer-based methods for simulation and optimization are needed to obtain the best possible designs. Prompted by this need, the proposed project aims at developing computational design methods for optimality and robustness in multi-physics and multi-criteria problems.
The project is done in collaboration with Siemens Energy AB who are interested in developing and applying computational design methods for gas turbine components. The pictures above illustrate design of so-called guide vanes, wing-like structures situated inside a gas turbine to guide the flow of hot gas, posed as a coupled three-dimensional thermal-fluid-solid topology optimization problem which is solved using high-performance computing.
Facts: funding, partner and project time
- Funded by ZENITH
- Industrial partner Siemens Energy
- Project start January 2021.
Optimized designs are 3D-printed and tested and serve as an important guide for the project work; depending on the outcomes steering it towards for example refined physics-models or optimization problem formulations.
