Secondary Flow Reduction by Blade Redesign and Endwall Contouring Using an Adjoint Optimization Method

For low-aspect-ratio turbine blades secondary loss reduction is important for improving performance. This paper presents the application of a viscous adjoint method to reduce secondary loss of a linear cascade. A scalable wall function is implemented in an existing Navier-Stokes flow solver to simulate the secondary flow with reduced requirements on grid density. The simulation result is in good agreement with the experimental data. Entropy production through a blade row is used as the objective function in the optimization of blade redesign and endwall contouring. With the adjoint method, the complete gradient information needed for optimization can be obtained by solving the governing flow equations and their corresponding adjoint equations only once, regardless of the number of design parameters. Three design cases are performed with a low-aspect-ratio steam turbine blade tested by Perdichizzi and Dossena. The results demonstrate that it is feasible to reduce flow loss through the redesign of the blade while maintaining the same mass-averaged turning angle. The effects on the profile loss and secondary loss due to the geometry modification of stagger angle, blade shape and endwall profile are presented and analyzed.