Roberto Agromayor, PhD, NTNU (associated PhD)

Automated design methods are emerging as a powerful tool for the fluid-dynamic design of turbomachinery components. Such automated methods integrate mathematical models of different level of sophistication with numerical optimisation techniques to explore large design spaces in a systematic way. This leads to higher performance gains and shortens the development time with respect to traditional design workflows based on trial-and- error. The focus of my research was to develop aerodynamic design method for turbomachinery blades operating under non-ideal thermodynamic conditions. The proposed method supports the optimisation of multiple blade rows in 2D, and it relies on a gradient-based shape optimisation framework that integrates the proposed computer-aided design (CAD) parametrisation with a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver. In order to demonstrate the capabilities of the method, we applied to design a new single-stage axial turbine operating with isobutane (R600a) that is going to be tested in the EXPAND facility at NTNU.