Integrated Design of an Active Flow Control System Using a Time-Dependent Adjoint Method

Computational AeroSciences Branch, NASA Langley Research Center Hampton, Virginia 23693 USA

^⋆ Corresponding author. E-mail: Eric.J.Nielsen@nasa.gov

Abstract

An exploratory study is performed to investigate the use of a time-dependent discrete adjoint methodology for design optimization of a high-lift wing configuration augmented with an active flow control system. The location and blowing parameters associated with a series of jet actuation orifices are used as design variables. In addition, a geometric parameterization scheme is developed to provide a compact set of design variables describing the wing shape. The scaling of the implementation is studied using several thousand processors and it is found that asynchronous file operations can greatly improve the overall performance of the approach in such massively parallel environments. Three design examples are presented which seek to maximize the mean value of the lift coefficient for the coupled system, and results demonstrate improvements as high as 27% relative to the lift obtained with non-optimized actuation. This lift gain is more than three times the incremental lift provided by the non-optimized actuation.