Combustor Design Optimisation Using Co-Kriging of Steady and Unsteady Turbulent Combustion

In the gas turbine industry, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations are often used to predict and visualize the complex reacting flow dynamics, combustion environment and emissions performance of a combustor at the design stage. Given the complexity involved in obtaining accurate flow predictions and due to the expensive nature of simulations, conventional techniques for CFD based combustor design optimisation are often ruled out, primarily due to the limits on available computing resources and time. The design optimisation process normally requires a large number of analyses of the objective and constraint functions which necessitates a careful selection of fast, reliable and efficient computational methods for the CFD analysis and the optimization process. In this study, given a fixed computational budget, an assessment of a co-Kriging based optimisation strategy against a standard Kriging based optimisation strategy is presented for the design of a 2D combustor using steady and unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) formulation. Within the fixed computational budget, using a steady RANS formulation, the Kriging strategy successfully captures the underlying response, however with unsteady RANS the Kriging strategy fails to capture the underlying response due to the existence of a high level of noise. The co-Kriging strategy is then applied to two design problems, one using two levels of grid resolutions in a steady RANS formulation and the other using steady and unsteady RANS formulations on the same grid resolution. With the co-Kriging strategy, the multi-fidelity analysis is expected to find an optimum design in comparatively less time than that required using the high-fidelity model alone since less high-fidelity function calls should be required. However, using the applied computational setup for co-Kriging, the Kriging strategy beats the co-Kriging strategy under the steady RANS formulation whereas under the unsteady RANS formulation, the high level of noise stalls the co-Kriging optimisation process.