Aerodynamic Design Optimization of a Variable Geometry Nozzle Vane For Automotive Turbochargers

An aerodynamic design optimization study of the nozzle vane of a variable geometry turbine (VGT) turbocharger for a diesel engine application was conducted using the commercial software, ANSYS CFX and DesignXplorer. The nozzle design was optimized at three critical engine operating points. The nozzle shape was parameterized using key design parameters including theta angle, thickness value and opening angle. For a good balance of computational time and accuracy, the optimization approach adopted meta-models and response surfaces to represent the training data and reduce the number of simulations required to reach an optimal design. Finally, more than 300 optimized designs were simulated to assess the performance and characteristics of each design. The final optimized nozzle design met all the design constraints and showed an improvement of up to 2% efficiency and reduced the maximum torque by 20% compared to the baseline nozzle.

Aerodynamic design optimization of a hypersonic rocket sled deflector using the free-form deformation technique

An aerodynamic design optimization of a hypersonic rocket sled deflector is presented using the free-form deformation (FFD) technique. The objective is to optimize the aerodynamic shape of the hypersonic rocket sled deflector to increase its negative lift and enhance the motion stability of the rocket sled. The FFD technique is selected as the aerodynamic shape parameterization method, and the continuous adjoint method based on the gradient method is used to search the optimization in the geometric shape parameter space; the computational fluid dynamics method for a hypersonic rocket sled is employed. An automatic design optimization method for the deflector is carried out based on the aerodynamic requirements of the rocket sled. The optimization results show that the optimized deflector meets the design requirement of increasing the negative lift under the constraint of drag. By improving the pressure distribution on the surface of the deflector, the negative lift is increased by 7.39%, which confirms the effectiveness of the proposed method.