Direct Design of Ducts

This paper describes a method for calculating the shape of duct that leads to a prescribed pressure distribution on the duct walls. The proposed design method is computationally inexpensive, robust, and a simple extension of existing computational fluid dynamics methods; it permits the duct shape to be directly calculated by including the coordinates that define the shape of the duct wall as dependent variables in the formulation. This “direct design method” is presented by application to two-dimensional ideal flow in ducts. The same method applies to many problems in thermofluids, including the design of boundary shapes for three-dimensional internal and external viscous flows.