Multistage Turbomachinery Design Using the Discrete Adjoint Method Within the Open-Source Software SU2

This paper documents a fully turbulent discrete adjoint method for three-dimensional multistage turbomachinery design. The method is based on a duality preserving algorithm and is implemented in the open-source computational fluid dynamics tool SU2. The SU2 Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes solver is first extended to treat three-dimensional steady turbomachinery flow using a conservative formulation of the mixing-plane coupled to nonreflective boundary conditions. The numerical features of the flow solver are automatically inherited by the discrete adjoint solver, ensuring the same convergence rate of the primal solver. The flow solver is then validated against experimental data available for three turbine configurations, namely, a one-and-half axial turbine stage, a transonic radial turbine coupled to a downstream diffuser, and a supersonic mini–organic Rankine cycle radial turbine operating with a fluid made by a heavy molecule. Finally the adjoint-based optimization framework is applied to the concurrent shape optimization of three rows of the axial turbine, demonstrating the advantages deriving from adopting multirow automated design methods in the context of turbomachinery design.