Accelerated whole engine structural design process based on data reuse

Abstract

The design of complex engineering systems, such as a gas turbine engine, is often decomposed into system design and subsystem/component design. Both the system and subsystem designs normally go through several design iterations. For each iteration, a series of analyses, simulations, optimisations and, at times, experiments are carried out to find the optimum. Traditionally, the data generated in one design iteration is not fed explicitly into the next iteration. This is because a new design iteration can often start with structural changes and the new design is considered to be topologically different from the previous design. Most existing design optimisation techniques cannot leverage the data across multiple design iterations and each design iteration has, therefore, to start almost from scratch. This paper presents a novel structural design process that is capable of accelerating both the component level and system level design by reusing data from previous design iterations. A case study of multiple design variables and topology changes in three components of a whole engine model (WEM) is carried out and it demonstrates that the proposed method employing surrogate modelling and data reuse technologies can significantly reduce analysis costs from one design iteration to the next.

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Identifiers

ORCID for David Toal: orcid.org/0000-0002-2203-0302

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