Computational Engineering Design for Micro-Scale Combustors

Abstract

At present, optimisation is an enabling technology in innovation. Multi-objective and multi-disciplinary design tools are essential in the engineering design process, and have been applied successfully in aerospace and turbomachinery applications extensively. These approaches give insight into the design space and identify the trade-offs between the competing performance measures satisfying a number of constraints at the same time. It is anticipated here that the same benefits can be obtained for the design of micro-scale combustors. In this paper, a multi-disciplinary automated design optimisation system was developed for this purpose, which comprises a commercial computational fluid dynamics package and a multi-objective variant of the Tabu Search optimisation algorithm. The main objectives that are considered in this study are to optimise the main micro-scale combustor design characteristics and to satisfy manufacturability considerations from the very beginning of the whole design operation. Hydrogen-air combustion as well as 14 geometrical and 2 operational parameters are used to describe and model the design problem. Two illustrative test cases will be presented, in which the most important device operational requirements are optimised, and the efficiency of the developed optimisation system is demonstrated. The identification, assessment and suitability of the optimum design configurations are discussed in detail.