Application of Surrogate Modeling to Design of A Compressor Blade to Optimize Stacking and Thickness

Abstract

Surrogate modeling is applied to a compressor blade shape optimization to modify its stacking line and thickness to enhance adiabatic efficiency and total pressure ratio. Six design variables are defined by parametric curves and three objectives; efficiency, total pressure and a combined objective of efficiency and total pressure are considered to enhance the performance of compressor blade. Latin hypercube sampling of design of experiments is used to generate 55 designs within design space constituted by the lower and upper limits of variables. Optimum designs are found by formulating a PRESS (predicted error sum of squares) based averaging (PBA) surrogate model with the help of a gradient based optimization algorithm. The optimum designs using the current variables show that, to optimize the performance of turbomachinery blade, the adiabatic efficiency objective is improved substantially while total pressure ratio objective is increased a very small amount. The multi-objective optimization shows that the efficiency can be increased with the less compensation of total pressure reduction or both objectives can be increased simultaneously.