Pedro Gomes, Department of Aeronautics, Imperial College London

Title:
Aerodynamic Driven Multidisciplinary Topology Optimization of Compliant Airfoils

Abstract:

We propose a strategy for density-based topology optimization of fluid structure interaction problems that deals with some short-comings associated with non stiffness-based design problems.
The method is demonstrated on a problem where we seek to improve the passive load alleviation characteristics of a highly compliant airfoil at high speed while producing sufficient lift at a lower speed.
The fluid structure interaction is simulated with the multi-physics suite SU2, which includes RANS modelling of the fluid and hyper-elastic material behaviour of the geometrically-nonlinear structure. Gradient-based optimization is used with the coupled aerostructural sensitivities being obtained via an algorithmic differentiation-based coupled discrete adjoint solver.