Flow field modeling and performance improving of an axial turbine's using Adjoint method

In recent years, optimization of Turbomachinery performance parameters is one of the most important topics for researchers and industrial scholars. The aerodynamic optimization of blades has been done by variety of algorithms and methods until now; however new tools have better suggestions in this field.
This paper reports a 3D numerical analysis and geometrical optimization of fully turbulent flow around a turbine's rotor blades. Numerical analysis is done using the AUSM scheme and SST k –ω turbulence model. An Ad-joint Algorithm gradient method is used in geometrical aerodynamic optimization of blades. This algorithm has been used previously for 2D models as build-in codes and for 3D models is done for the first time in this research.
The total to total isentropic efficiency as objective function and other performance parameters have a good agreement with the experimental measurements in validation process. Through the optimization process, the objective function is improved by 0.18, which in comparison with other's reported works is a good progress in performance improvement.